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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