Ritz Interactive builds proprietary system to protect credit card data
Although he’s concerned about the increase in attempts to steal credit card payment data, Ritz Interactive CEO Fred Lerner says a proprietary system built to encrypt and delete sensitive information has kept transaction security problems at bay. "Online merchants have to be extremely careful these days," he says, "because there are a lot more people in the world out to defraud us."
Ritz operates 15 retail web sites including RitzCamera.com and BoatersWorld.com. Its in-house IT staff used server and operating system technology from Sun Microsystems Inc. on top of IBM’s Websphere platform to configure a system that automatically encrypts customer data and deletes the most sensitive information, like credit card account numbers, from its network. So after the encrypted account data is sent over secure lines to a credit card settlement bank, it’s no longer available on Ritz’s network, Lerner says. Customer transactions are still tracked internally, but only by a customer order number that permanently remains with each transaction.
"We provide online security so no one ever has access to our customer information," Lerner says.
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