News
WatchGuard Firewall Appliances Provide Remote Kiosk Security and Credit/Debit Card Customer Data Protection
April 2009 by Marc Jacob
WatchGuard® Technologies announced that ePlay, an innovator in the DVD rental business, has selected WatchGuard solutions to provide PCI DSS compliant firewall security, and to protect thousands of remote DVD and video game disc rental kiosks as well as ePlay’s back-end data centre.
“After evaluating Cisco, and other network security vendors, ePlay standardised on WatchGuard for their high security, performance, reliability and unbeatable total cost of ownership,” said David Stellmack, Senior Systems Engineer at ePlay. “This is a mission-critical network comprised of remote kiosks and a data centre transacting a large volume of payment card transactions. With WatchGuard in place, we can drive down costs, reduce time to market, and increase our provisioning process by two-fold.”
PCI DSS Compliant Protection
Critical to ePlay selection was choosing a vendor that best met PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) requirements. For this, ePlay turned to WatchGuard to provide the instrumental role in PCI DSS requirement 1 – Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data.
To do this, each ePlay kiosk is armed with a WatchGuard Firebox Edge appliance to provide firewall, intrusion detection/prevention services, and highly secure VPN network connectivity. For remote kiosks, such as those located outdoors, ePlay utilises the WatchGuard 3G Extend family of wireless connectivity solutions. With it, triple-DES encrypted VPN tunnels carry payment card and other sensitive data via 3G cellular networks. This gives ePlay maximum flexibility for kiosk deployments, usage models and most importantly, strong cardholder data security.
With hundreds of remote firewall appliances to manage, and thousands more to come in the next few years, ePlay relies on WatchGuard System Manager, which provides ePlay with a PCI DSS friendly, free software solution to manage and upgrade remote WatchGuard appliances.
At the data centre, a pair of WatchGuard X Peak 8500 e-series, running in high availability mode, terminates remote kiosk VPN tunnels. As required by the PCI DSS, this network of cardholder data is completely walled off and separated from ePlay’s corporate network and online reservation architectures, which are protected by other WatchGuard firewall appliances.
Stellmack concludes, “I’ve looked at other kiosk vendors and shudder at their approach to security; I don’t think they’re deploying anything even close to enterprise-level security for credit card transactions. We would rather be over-secure, and WatchGuard helps provide that.”
About e-Play, LLC
e-Play is a revolutionary way of marketing, delivering and purchasing DVDs and Video Games: a high-tech DVD rental platform combined with the ability to buy/sell/trade video games all in a single machine. e-Play provides the technical innovation for its units to hold thousands of discs, convert used discs into cash or credit at the retailer and perform a playability check on every disc dispensed. The machines include new releases and catalogue titles and feature an interactive touch LCD screen playing trailers and interactive advertising. Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, e-Play Makes it Easy to Find the Movies – and now, the Games - You Want.
