William Hill bets on encryption

UK betting and gaming company William Hill has implemented a new encryption platform for strategic mobile enterprise data protection, increased security and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance.

With over 14,000 employees, more than 2,000 betting offices and a large gaming and kiosk portfolio, William Hill processes over one million bets a day in its shops, on the phone and over the internet.

As such, it is a classed as a 'Tier one' PCI vendor and it must also consider the UK Gambling Commission Remote Technical Standards (RTS), developed in line with the ISO 27001 information security standard.

PGP Corporation's encryption platform has replaced a point product that slowed laptop performance and hampered William Hill's ability to comply with PCI DSS requirements when it began to formalise a data protection strategy and found that the existing full-disk encryption product would not support an integrated, centrally managed security architecture.

"We want just one, central management server that can control all encryption applications, rather than lots of dispersed, siloed environments," said Nick Copley, William Hill's information systems security manager.

PGP partner Gradian Systems worked with the company to implement PGP Universal Server and deploy PGP Whole Disk Encryption to the laptop estate.

The investment also enables William Hill to deploy more encryption applications in future in support of its security and regulatory compliance strategies. Previously, the lack of remote manageability in the legacy full-disk product required William Hill to physically recall every laptop to manually decrypt data and de-install the software before loading the PGP Whole Disk Encryption agent. Now, its integration with Microsoft Active Directory will also facilitate more remote management and laptop deployment.

"With the PGP encryption platform we get whole disk encryption and can use the benefits of the encryption in other information areas in a holistic, single-vendor platform approach," said Copley.

Miya Knights

A 25-year veteran enterprise technology expert, Miya Knights applies her deep understanding of technology gained through her journalism career to both her role as a consultant and as director at Retail Technology Magazine, which she helped shape over the past 17 years. Miya was educated at Oxford University, earning a master’s degree in English.

Her role as a journalist has seen her write for many of the leading technology publishers in the UK such as ITPro, TechWeekEurope, CIO UK, Computer Weekly, and also a number of national newspapers including The Times, Independent, and Financial Times.