Airmiles safeguards customer information

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Airmiles, the online portal for redeeming air miles travelled against rewards, has deployed new encryption and key management database technology to protect the financial and personal information of its eight million members.

The travel loyalty scheme will now be able to provide tighter security around the two million transactions handled by its systems each year and ensure it complies with the key steps of the recently introduced Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) that mandates how retailers should process and store their customer's financial data for security purposes.

"Retaining the trust of millions of customers is something that we don't take lightly, so it was vital that we found an encryption solution that was as manageable as it was secure," said Gavin Woolnough, Airmiles' infrastructure manager.

"We wanted to ensure that our data security was as efficient as possible in terms of cost and performance."

The encryption capabilities supplied by specialist Ingrian Networks provides the cryptographic throughput required to protect the data stored in its existing Oracle database, as well as new data captured through its payment processing software. The new DataSecure platform will also replace the native encryption provided by its e-commerce platform.

The platform has been installed at Airmiles' two UK offices to ensure full failover for disaster recovery purposes and enable more than 20,000 cryptographic operations per second.

In addition, the keys that decrypt the data are also encrypted and centrally managed to provide greater control over access privileges, ensuring that compromised data remains useless in the wrong hands.

Woolnough added that the new appliances automate key management and access monitoring, alleviating the cost and burden of manually managing these processes.

"Being able to set user access rights helps to ensure that certain data can remain strictly 'for your eyes only' and having this backed up by concise audit logs adds significant peace of mind," he said.

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