How fast an HSM can process requests for data encryption or decryption is often one of the primary concerns for financial services organizations when it comes to building out their infrastructure and planning for growth. All things being equal, you’re going to want the fastest, most capable processing backend you can find.
And that’s where we rise to the top.
Our payment HSM solution offers industry-leading performance based on number of transactions per second (TPS) in the industry. That’s why some of the world’s retailers and financial services organizations have turned to Futurex’s Excrypt Series — HSMs that are ideal for securing electronic payments — because of their TPS performance, comprehensive feature set, and overall robustness.
We optimize our HSMs for speed at the hardware design level and design them to efficiently handle different types of cryptographic algorithms simultaneously — symmetric key algorithms like 3DES and AES for financial cryptographic processing and asymmetric key algorithms like RSA for general purpose processing.
Let’s slow down for a moment and look at the role of HSMs in transaction processing. Payment HSMs are the security backbone of the worldwide financial ecosystem, providing the cryptographic functions needed to support end-to-end data security, including encryption and cryptography key management. As a long-time partner with the financial services industry, Futurex HSMs are used to handle security for billions of transactions per year. We’re at the core of the critical cryptographic infrastructure that enables safe and secure commerce around the world.
Why is speed so important in HSMs? It ultimately comes down to having the ability to scale to handle tens or even hundreds of thousands of transactions per second without impacting the customer experience. At a granular retail level, imagine the frustration for customers if a payment terminal suddenly starts taking seconds or minutes to verify a debit or credit card purchase because an unexpected surge of transactions has overwhelmed the HSM. Nothing good comes from making customers wait. At a system level, it’s important to accurately estimate your peak transaction volume and ensure that your HSM has enough capacity to handle even a worst-case scenario.
When it comes to speed, PIN translations per seconds is typically how HSM performance is measured. PIN translations are a specialized form of encryption performed by HSMs and can be computationally intense at scale, involving the need to encrypt and decrypt a PIN as it travels from consumer to card terminal to the issuing bank and back. As you might expect, Futurex HSMs also score well above the industry average for PIN translations per second.
Multiple Uses on the Same Platform
A high level of processing capability allows organizations to run multiple, computationally- and cryptographically-intense applications and processes on one HSM. This is where HSM virtualization comes into play, with fewer boxes to accomplish the same goals. HSM virtualization allows a single physical HSM to function as multiple virtual HSMs. Each virtual device operates as a completely separate HSM with its own set of customizable parameters, giving customers a high return of investment and eliminating the need to purchase separate HSMs for each application. This is available on the Futurex Vectera HSM Series and Futurex Excrypt SSP Enterprise v.2.
Performance also comes into play if you want to deploy more applications and reduce overall rack space. Or, you want to add broader data protection use cases to the mix. These are all scenarios where a fast HSM is vital to keep your customers from waiting for a transaction to finish processing.
Financial services organizations — banks, credit unions, FinTechs, transaction processors, and retailers — are always looking at better ways to process and manage sensitive financial data at scale. When growth and new opportunities come along, it’s vital that your payment processing infrastructure combines world-class security with world-class performance.
With Futurex you can be confident that when the transaction volume heats up, our HSMs have the speed you need. Isn’t it time you took one of our super-fast HSMs out for a test drive? Let’s talk!
About Futurex
For over 40 years, Futurex has been a trusted provider of hardened, enterprise data encryption solutions. More than 15,000 organizations worldwide have used Futurex’s innovative hardware security modules, key management system, and cloud HSM solutions to address mission-critical data encryption and our PKI solution.