LATEST INTELLIGENCE driving the transformation of the payments industry requires not just infrastructure to be available ; it also requires cloud-ready technologies that are agile , flexible , secure , and ready to harness the benefit that cloud infrastructure can offer . It is the ground-breaking approach that independent software vendors like NEC Payments – working closely with its global technology partner Microsoft - are taking to building security and agility by design into its software products ; coupled with the power , scalability and speed of the Microsoft Azure cloud that is enabling true digital transformation and delivering new deployment options into an industry segment that has been static for a considerable period .
This transformation was manifested at the GITEX event held in Dubai during October 2016 where NEC Payments and Microsoft jointly announced the availability of NEC Payments ’ MasterCard and PCI-DSS compliant suite of transaction processing technologies in Microsoft Azure .
“ NEC Payments not only completed the technical aspects of the project in a short period of time , but also aligned its product offering with Microsoft ’ s objective of helping its customers drive Digital Transformation and use the power and scale of the Microsoft Azure Cloud to enable payments transaction processing ”.
- Chief Innovation Officer , Microsoft Gulf . October 2016
By leveraging a purely virtualised software and security design that is built using . net framework and SQL technologies , NEC Payments has been able to create a flexible and agile processing solution that is native to the Microsoft platform and to Azure . Utilising the Microsoft platform , and re-engineering the design of the processing engine from scratch , has enabled NEC Payments to build a technology product that is compliant with the most recent thinking in cyber security and that provides the flexibility to cope with current and future market and product developments . Its virtual account-based hierarchy is fully tokenised and compatible with multiple external transaction and integration channels via a set of secure and flexible open-APIs . This enables external networks and payment devices , such as MasterCard EMV or contactless cards , core banking and EFTS ; to be seamlessly handled alongside other more innovative channels like external digital wallets or cryptocurrency accounts ; or integrations with the latest CRM and ERP solutions built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 or other business process platforms .
Additionally , virtualisation has been achieved – whilst maintaining PCI-DSS L1 v3.2 security requirements – through the development of a highly innovative Software Security Module ( SSM ). The SSM is deployed into a segregated virtual machine that operates in a high security zone and performs the secure processing operations that are in most cases handled by a HSM . These operations include multi-level encrypted key storage ; multi-custodian key injection , key generation and check sum validation ; and a processing service that manages keys and cryptographic work during operational flows and communications with other platform components .
As well as opening-up a broader range of deployment and scalability options ; the SSM also increases processing capacity through the simultaneous handling of multiple cryptographic operations - for example as seen in an incoming authorisation from a payment scheme - resulting in higher performance and volume handling capability than many traditional HSMs .
These , and other innovative features of NEC Payments software product , when coupled with Azure ’ s powerful , highly-scalable , resilient and secure infrastructure , facilitate deployment at a significantly faster pace than traditional on-premises environments , and enable NEC Payments to offer its customers the widest range of deployment options in the industry .
1 . Pure cloud infrastructure Fully redundant production and DR environments hosted in Microsoft Azure can be deployed and scaled-up or scaled-down , in a matter of minutes , in any of Microsoft ’ s regions globally . These environments can be operated on a SaaS basis by NEC Payments as a Microsoft Cloud Services Provider , or can be installed as a licensed product and managed by customers themselves under Azure accounts that they operate with Microsoft .
2 . Hybrid infrastructure Azure environments can be created for use as disaster recovery and business continuity planning resources linked to traditional on-premises environments , with near to zero recovery point and recovery time objectives , and at a fraction of the expected usual costs .
3 . On-premises NEC Payments recognises that in some situations there remain regulatory and policy challenges to running secure workloads or hosting sensitive data in the cloud . In addition to its Azure public cloud capabilities , NEC Payments has engaged with Huawei as an Enterprise Partner and has built a fully redundant on-premises data centre in Bahrain . Through this partnership a standardised high-performance , low-foot print hardware , network and security design has been created , founded upon Huawei enterprise servers and networking appliances . This standardised design can be replicated into client or colocation data centres as a private cloud to satisfy scenarios where onpremises hosting – or hosting within specific geographies- is a mandatory corporate policy or compliance requirement of a regulator .
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