nuBridges announced today that Debenhams, one of the UK’s largest retailers, has selected nuBridges Protect(TM) to secure customer credit card numbers and comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), without expanding its IT infrastructure.
“At the point of selection, nuBridges was the only vendor we evaluated that could provide tokenisation out-of-the-box effectively”
Debenhams is leveraging nuBridges’ award-winning nuBridges Protect data security solution to handle the encryption and tokenisation of credit card information collected at its 159 stores located throughout the UK and Ireland, as well as its online store. nuBridges Format Preserving Tokenisation(TM) data security solution enabled Debenhams to implement tokenisation across its heterogeneous IT infrastructure throughout its retail, order management and data warehouse systems, without costly programming modifications to applications and databases or requiring additional computing resources to hold encrypted cardholder information.
“nuBridges Protect fit our requirements for an all-encompassing single solution for encryption, tokenisation and key management to manage our existing heterogeneous infrastructure that includes a blend of legacy systems and newer technology,” said Aqil Nasser, Debenhams’ Technical Architecture Controller. “Because of its ability to run on all of our systems non-intrusively, we were able to meet all of the PCI DSS encryption requirements and avoid cost and people effort for additional programming and hardware costs that would have been required to run the other solutions we evaluated.”
Debenhams accepts many major credit cards and as a result of PCI compliance is now encrypting these at source and then transferring the encrypted data to the Data Centre to be tokenised. Tokenised credit card numbers expose only the first four digits of the card numbers, which limits the incidences where the full card number appears to authorised employees, solving a key data security issue. Because nuBridges tokens retain the size of the original credit card number, applications and business processes run without modification while adding an extra layer of security to cardholder information.
“nuBridges Protect is so robust and simple to implement that all we had to do was improve our controls,” said Nasser. “We avoided having to add staff to ensure PCI compliance, because the software does the work for us.”
Before selecting nuBridges Protect, Nasser tapped technology industry analyst firm Gartner to narrow the solutions for evaluation. Only a few vendors could perform tokenisation on the IBM i platform (also known as IBM AS/400 or System i), a chief requirement for Debenhams. nuBridges emerged the market leader and was invited to conduct a proof-of-concept in which it successfully demonstrated that nuBridges Protect could run tokenisation on Debenhams’ data set in any system or database while enabling authorised employees to decrypt the data whenever necessary.
“At the point of selection, nuBridges was the only vendor we evaluated that could provide tokenisation out-of-the-box effectively,” said Nasser. “Just as important, the nuBridges advisors understood the challenges of our retail environment, and came up with clever ideas for our unique situation. They worked closely with our security and technical teams to implement a solid data security solution that won the approval of our board and has made the PCI compliance process much easier and less expensive than we had originally anticipated.”
Tokenisation is a rising data security model that substitutes meaningless surrogate values-tokens-for sensitive and confidential information. nuBridges Protect is the industry’s first data security software solution to combine a new variation of tokenisation-Format Preserving Tokenisation-with strong local encryption, centralized encryption key management and logging in one platform-agnostic package. nuBridges Protect is designed for organizations that need to protect payment card numbers as well as volumes of personally identifiable information (PII) from theft and accidental loss, while reducing complexity and simplifying compliance management for data security standards and privacy laws.
“We’re pleased to count Debenhams as a flagship customer for implementing tokenisation,” said Kim Addington, nuBridges Chief Marketing Officer. “We’re proud that our partnership has helped them to achieve PCI DSS compliance as well as demonstrate how nuBridges can help companies implement a data security program across the extended enterprise through a blend of proven technology and expert counsel on data security issues.”
About Debenhams
Debenhams is a leading department stores group. Debenhams has a strong presence in key product categories including womenswear, menswear, homewares, health and beauty, accessories, lingerie and childrenswear. A unique mix of exclusive own brands, including Designers at Debenhams, and third-party brands helps differentiate Debenhams from its competitors. Debenhams has 159 stores including 13 Desire by Debenhams stores, across the UK and Ireland with approximately 10.9 million square feet of trading space and around 24,000 employees. In addition Debenhams has 51 international franchise stores in 18 countries outside the UK and Ireland. Debenhams is also extending its customer reach by making direct sales through its internet website. Debenhams has a successful own brand portfolio of approximately 55 own brands (such as Debut, Maine New England, Red Herring and Thomas Nash) including 25 Designers at Debenhams brands. The Designers at Debenhams range offers customers exclusive product lines at mainstream prices by designers such as Jasper Conran, Julien Macdonald, John Rocha and Matthew Williamson. Third party brands are either bought by Debenhams (such as Estée Lauder and Levi Strauss) or available through in-store concessions (such as Oasis).
About nuBridges
nuBridges provides technology solutions for extended enterprises that share sensitive data across applications, departments and organisations, and face complex security and compliance mandates. Its data encryption, data tokenisation, key management, managed file transfer and EDI solutions help customers get information from point A to point B; do it safely; and prove compliance. Proven in production, nuBridges software and services scale across heterogeneous enterprise environments, including legacy systems, and offer unified visibility for improved analysis, decision support and administrative efficiency. nuBridges solutions and support have established a new standard of quality for the industry, and are trusted by the world’s most demanding organisations to exchange and protect billions of payment card transactions, personal data records and business-critical file transfers. More information is available at www.nubridges.com.
