Holding onto card holder data has its advantages, especially for managing recurring orders or to speed up overall transaction time. However, there are additional risks and guidelines associated with retaining data compiled from your merchant account.

What is Required to Store Customer Data

To store credit card numbers, a business must adhere to stricter PCI Security Council Data Security Standards. There is an increased risk of losing customer data to a security breach or a hardware malfunction.

Storing customer sensitive data is also more complicated from a technical perspective, requiring several hardware and software tools to do it effectively. Security measures need to be consistently maintained and updated by a trusted person.

Despite the risks, sometimes credit card number storage is a necessity. In this case, it’s best to look at an external data storage company.

Why it Pays to Store Data Off-site

Customers are the lifeblood of your business, and they trust you with sensitive information. Outsourcing storage of customer credit card information ensures its protected by the highest security measures available, and by someone focused solely on safe data storage. Running a business is work enough, and offloading this responsibility to a respected vendor can save lots of time and headaches.

In addition, some outsourcing services have a more effective process in place to bill recurring customers, rather than retaining credit card processing information. Choose an online payment gateway that offers this type of data storage. It will be held in the gateway’s secure database for easy access. When you need to charge a customer again, just refer to the customer number and charge amount.

Authorize Net can be configured both ways. While most merchants use Authorize Net’s secure servers it also works with sites that want to maintian sensitive customer data on their own servers.