Time to Migrate Your HSM? Look for World-Class Security, Performance, and Cloud Scalability Flexibility

With multiple payment HSM vendors currently going through end-of-life processes with their HSMs, organizations are looking for other options to meet their world-class security and cloud integration needs. Especially now, many organizations are interested in migrating their payment infrastructures to the cloud. Is it time to consider Futurex?

When speed, scale, and high availability are required, the largest financial services organizations and retailers depend on Futurex and its complete line of HSM offerings, including cloud and on-premises solutions to secure transactions for the world’s financial ecosystem at top speeds. Futurex has the fastest payment HSMs in the industry, delivering 25,000 transactions per second (TPS).

HSM Migration Made Simple

“With universally compatible HSMs that can integrate with all major payment application providers, customers can migrate to our HSMs without changing any of their application code,” said David Close, chief solutions architect at Futurex.

Futurex’s full suite of HSMs for the payments industry include:

• VirtuCrypt Cloud Payment HSM. Cloud-based with native AWS cloud integration, the VirtuCrypt Cloud Payment HSM is an OPEX model and easy to deploy. Ideal for transaction acquiring, card and mobile issuing, point-to-point encryption.
• Excrypt SSP Enterprise v.2. The industry’s leading payment HSM, the Excrypt SSP Enterprise v.2 offers vast cryptographic functionality and is highly scalable. It features full redundancy and platform virtualization, and universal compatibility.
• Excrypt Plus. Designed for both payment and general-purpose use. The Excrypt Plus supports every major encryption algorithm to protect data in transit and at rest.

Always On, Always Available

Why are HSMs so critical and needed in the payments space? The core requirements for encryption key management are universal: robust security, control, and scalability. In terms of key management, HSMs are tasked with compliantly managing the lifecycle of encryption keys used across an organization’s estate of applications. This includes creating, managing, storing, distributing, and retiring or revoking keys. Sophisticated key management solutions are essential to any cryptographic operation and encryption requires that cryptographic infrastructures be built on a high availability architecture. High availability architectures prevent downtime due to failures and challenges of any kind, such as hardware or software failures or damaging environmental conditions such as power outages, flooding, or the newly distributed workforce introduced by the pandemic.

When migrating or upgrading enterprise cryptographic infrastructure, such as HSMs, organizations must prioritize scalable architectures and systems as a critical requirement for growing business environments. The “always on, always available” needs of financial institutions and retailers is especially important, whether involving high-volume financial transaction processing or issuing hundreds of millions of certificates, financial services organizations require security and an nth degree of throughput scalability to handle the volume.

It’s critical for financial services organizations to always keep cardholder information safe from malicious, unintended use. Futurex’s point-to-point encryption (P2PE) solutions, for example, help organizations encrypt, store, and transmit this sensitive data securely — and can even help meet PCI DSS control objectives and trim the scope of PCI audits. In a retail environment, P2PE begins when cardholder data encryption keys are injected into retail point-of-sale terminals, either directly or remotely. Cardholder data will then be automatically encrypted at the point of capture and can be decrypted once safely held within the compliant Futurex HSM.

“It’s never been a better time to migrate to a Futurex HSM,” said Ryan Smith, vice president, global business development, at Futurex. “With four decades of HSM R&D and in-depth knowledge of the payment industry’s security needs, Futurex’s HSMs have industry-first functionality with automation, HSM virtualization, RESTful APIs for modern development, and the fastest payment speeds in the world.”

This is the first blog post in a series of three on migrating your HSM.