RKON utilized their existing codebase and PCI-DSS expertise to rapidly develop customized Terraform Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules that satisfy PCI-DSS and customer requirements, while allowinging customization to their environment. For example, these modules include the GCP organization hierarchy, foundational resources (such as VPC networking and centralized logging), security resources (including intrusion detection capabilities and compliant KMS keys for encryption), and infrastructure to run their workloads such as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and database clusters.

Designed as an ideal model for this customer’s cloud environment, the Infrastructure as Code modules were written to be reusable across multiple geographies and support reuse across the customer’s non-PCI workloads as well. Cloud native security controls were implemented across the environment to minimize the need to purchase additional security tooling to meet PCI-DSS requirements, along with the operational overhead that goes along with managing those tools.

To ensure the security and confidentiality of any cardholder data in the environment, GCP Organization Policy constraints were designed and implemented to restrict access to only PCI-compliant services and prevent performing non-compliant configurations for any supported resources. Additionally, the environment was designed according to the principle of least privilege, ensuring users within the customer environment were unable to access the environment or its data unless absolutely necessary.

With RKON’s assistance, the customer was able to focus on application development rather than design and deploy the many infrastructure components and security services necessary to achieve PCI compliance in GCP. In a matter of weeks, RKON designed, deployed, and trained the customer on how to operate PCI-compliant workloads within their new GCP environment. This allowed the customer to focus on delivery and deployment of their application to begin in-house processing for their multi-billion dollar annual online and brick-and-mortar sales, while allowing them to eliminate potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in transaction service fees over time.