Case Study: Debenhams achieves PCI DSS compliance and cost savings with Liaison Technologies' Liaison Protect

Liaison Protect Eases PCI Compliance for Retail Giant Debenhams

Debenhams, a UK retail chain with 167 stores, extensive online operations and a heterogeneous, partly legacy IT estate (including IBM i systems), needed to meet PCI DSS requirements for protecting cardholder data without a costly overhaul of its infrastructure. The challenge was to encrypt and tokenise card numbers from point-of-sale through back-end systems and reporting while minimising changes to applications, databases and hardware.

After a proof-of-concept, Debenhams implemented Liaison Protect for encryption, format-preserving tokenisation, key management and logging across its retail, order-management and data-warehouse systems. The solution ran non-intrusively on existing platforms (including IBM i), kept tokens the same size as card numbers so applications required no modification, limited exposure to full card numbers (showing only the last four digits) and eliminated the need for major new infrastructure or extra staff—resulting in PCI DSS compliance that was faster, simpler and less expensive than anticipated.

Debenhams

Aqil Nasser

Technical Architecture Controller