Case Study
Pay-Ease is a bill payment processing company that assists many municipalities and utilities in collecting walk-in payments on electronic kiosks. Since Pay-Ease is involved with credit card and government transactions, they are required to have a data center that is both SAS 70 certified and PCI Compliant.
Any organization that accepts credit card transactions must be PCI compliant. This verifies that a merchant or payment processor has conformed to the security standards to protect cardholder data (CHD) through an approach that covers every aspect of a technology-based solution including documented policies, stringent physical security measures, encryption, firewall settings, regular detailed audits, and everything in between. The SAS 70 designation demonstrates that the data center has the proper controls and security control procedures that are required by Sarbanes-Oxley.
“One of the PCI compliant requirements is that every server needs to perform one function and one function only,” says Tom Numbere JR. of PCG Technology Services. “This is one of the reasons it can be very expensive to become PCI compliant.”
For Pay-Ease who has multiple cities and multiple clients, this would increase their price ten-fold by having separate servers for each operation. So, Pay-Ease needed to come up with a solution to this problem.
“OTAVA presented a great way to lower costs by providing us the opportunity to virtualize the server environment,” says Numbere. “Their expertise and private cloud were integral to the project’s success.”
Collaborating with OTAVA’s technical team, Pay-Ease developed a scalable, flexible, and secure virtual server and storage environment for both their production and backup environments.
“We have trusted OTAVA with the heartbeat of our business. We are able to utilize a virtual cloud environment and still be in a secure SAS 70 certified, PCI compliant environment” notes Dean Scaros, President and Founder of Pay-Ease.
OTAVA’s OT Private Cloud computing platform offers Pay-Ease a fully managed private cloud computing platform with 24X7 monitoring, management, electronic offsite backup, and IT disaster recovery. With the fully redundant private cloud encompassing both servers and storage, Pay-Ease enjoys seamless failover and the ability to add, reconfigure or delete servers, hardware, or software with zero downtime at any time of the day without impacting customers. Because Pay-ease can quickly add resources to their private cloud, they have positioned their IT infrastructure to keep up with their accelerating business growth in eCommerce SaaS services.
With OTAVA’s OT Private Cloud, Pay-Ease is able to reduce their costs and expand quickly states Scaros. “It puts me in a competitive position with my competitors when bidding on projects.”
Pay-Ease is a frontrunner in electronic financial processing software and consumer bill payment. Headquartered in Chicago, IL, Pay-Ease’s utilizes their knowledge and experience from over 20 years of financial software development to create a fully integrated network solution for consumer bill payment processing and other financial services.
PCG is a leader in IT Strategy and Compliance. Headquartered in Chicago, IL, PCG leverages the experience of their team of long-time industry professionals to assist clients in reducing overall costs, improving productivity, and achieving regulatory compliance.
