If your organization accepts, processes, or transmits payment card data, then you have to get and stay PCI DSS compliant to build trust with your customers and avoid fines. 

Some organizations spend hundreds of hours manually collecting evidence, creating and updating policies, and managing vendor risk to achieve and maintain PCI compliance — but they don’t have to spend these countless hours achieving compliance.

Automation can reduce the time, effort, and money needed to achieve compliance by making the process more efficient. 

How Long Does PCI DSS Compliance Take Without Automation?

Without a compliance automation platform, getting PCI DSS compliant requires a significant amount of manual work and time.

While the exact timeline depends on factors like the size of the organization and the scope of your PCI DSS environment, there are several steps every organization must take. These include but are not limited to:

• Scoping your cardholder data environment
• Establishing and maintaining PCI cardholder data security policies
• Collecting evidence to provide to auditors for PCI’s 300+ requirements
• Completing risk assessments
• Training employees on PCI cardholder data security training and secure coding best practices

It’s estimated that completing these readiness initiatives can take up to a year to complete. This does not include the time it would take to maintain compliance throughout the year either. 

How Much Does PCI DSS Compliance Cost Without Automation?

Like the compliance timeline, PCI compliance costs vary depending on a wide range of factors, including:

• The size and business type of your organization
• The service in scope and your segmentation effort
• The scope and complexity of your cardholder data environment
• The requirements of your customers and acquiring bank

On average, between the audit, introducing new tools, and additional services, organizations can expect to spend between $20K to more than $200K per year to achieve and stay compliant with PCI DSS. 

The high costs of achieving and maintaining PCI DSS compliance are essentially due to the fact that organizations must either purchase multiple security tools to properly implement PCI requirements, dedicate an existing team to the PCI effort or hire security compliance personnel to assist, or hire a third-party consultant or firm to help design, implement, and monitor PCI requirements on a continuous basis.

A third-party consultant or firm with PCI DSS expertise can help conduct a gap analysis, create a remediation plan, and assess your organization controls to help you prepare for PCI DSS compliance — but at significantly high costs. On average, companies can expect to pay a consulting firm at least $10,000 for gap assessments, $15-25,000 for an assisted SAQ assessment, and $20,000 for a RoC if they are a QSA firm. 

How Automation Can Fast-Track PCI DSS Compliance

Secureframe’s compliance automation platform streamlines the compliance process. We save teams hundreds of hours and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by providing security policies, automatically collecting evidence, offering PCI DSS expertise and support, and providing you a readiness assessment by showing you passing and failing tests related to all 12 PCI DSS requirements.

Secureframe automates as much of the testing as possible from beginning to end, helping you achieve PCI DSS compliance faster, saving you money, and strengthening your security posture.

Checklists and Dashboards for Audit Readiness 

Assign tasks to individuals on your team responsible for specific tests throughout your preparation and track your progress towards being audit-ready utilizing the Secureframe dashboard. You’ll always have a real-time view of what tests are currently passing and exactly what you can do to pass failing tests before inviting your auditor into the Secureframe platform.

Automated Evidence Collection to Streamline the Audit Process

Secureframe automatically generates evidence throughout the year so when it comes time for the audit there is no need to submit screenshots for every technical configuration within your environment. For supplemental evidence, easily upload evidence directly to the tests that support PCI DSS requirements or upload to the Data Room to handle general evidence which can easily be exported by the auditor.

Expert Support from Onboarding to Report Submission and Beyond

Our team of in-house compliance experts has decades of combined audit advisory and assessing experience. Our team will understand your company’s specific audit requirements, and help provide tailored guidance based on Secureframe test results, and guide you through your compliance process.

Continuous Platform Monitoring to Maintain Compliance

From your cloud infrastructure to your ticketing systems and background check provider, we continuously scan these tools and compare the configurations to compliance requirements, monitoring your tech stack to help you understand exactly what is required to stay compliant throughout the year.

Thousands of companies trust Secureframe to streamline PCI compliance. If you’re ready to get started, schedule a demo with one of our product experts.