New Payment Tokenization Service Unveiled for the Akamai Cloud

Akamai Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of cloud optimization services, today unveiled its Edge Tokenization electronic payment security service. Seamless and undisruptive to a retailer's existing eCommerce workflow, the Akamai solution enables credit card data to be converted to a token prior to Web transactions landing on a merchant's infrastructure.

By alleviating the requirement for retailers to route customer credit card data on their own infrastructure, the service helps reduce information theft and compliance risk while lowering Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance costs. Edge Tokenization automates credit card tokenization within the Akamai cloud, providing payment security and operational convenience for Web retailers without the need to increase spending on internal infrastructure.

To facilitate its Edge Tokenization, Akamai has integrated its cloud-based technology with tokenization solutions from its partner CyberSource, a Visa company. The relationship with CyberSource, one of the world's leading payment management services providers, offers Akamai's customers turnkey integration to enterprise payment tokenization services.

"We've always maintained merchants shouldn't seek to secure payment data, but instead, eliminate contact with it," said Michael Walsh, president and chief executive officer, CyberSource. "Akamai's Edge Tokenization automatically combines the concept of hosted payment acceptance and payment tokenization with cloud-based web infrastructure, making it easy for online merchants to meet compliance requirements with less cost, complexity and time."

Relying on Akamai's distributed and massively-scalable EdgePlatform, Edge Tokenization enables consumer credit card data to be identified and replaced with an anonymous token, which along with the true card number, is stored in a secure data vault managed by the tokenization provider.

Although hosted payment acceptance and payment tokenization solutions that eliminate the need to route or store credit card data on merchant infrastructure have been available for some time, Akamai's focus on next-generation, cloud security has produced the industry's first offering that automatically incorporates these technologies as a part of a merchant's web infrastructure, making it easier for merchants to adopt and maintain an Enterprise Payment Security 2.0 strategy.

"Meeting stringent PCI compliance standards often takes repeated efforts, significant investment, and regular maintenance, translating into high costs and significant IT resources," said Tom Leighton, chief scientist and co-founder, Akamai.  "We developed Edge Tokenization as a cost efficient solution for Web retailers to complete transactions in the cloud securely and at scale, while improving performance."

For a variety of product information and white papers related to Akamai's Edge Tokenization offering, please visit http://www.akamai.com/html/solutions/security/edge_tokenization.html. Each quarter Akamai also publishes a "State of the Internet" report with data gathered across Akamai's global server network about attack Internet traffic, average & maximum connection speeds, Internet penetration and broadband adoption, and mobile usage, as well as trends seen in this data over time.