Making PCI compliance easier with Azure SQL Database

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is designed to prevent fraud using credit card information through increased controls around credit card data. Obtaining PCI DSS compliance is a requirement for all organizations that accept credit card payments, process credit card transactions or transmit or store credit card data. For organizations that have their own data centers, it can be a time consuming and costly process to become PCI compliant. Many organizations are not able to take on the responsibility of building a PCI-compliant environment and handle the daily responsibilities that come with being PCI compliant. Migrating to or building those environments in Microsoft Azure can drastically reduce the PCI-compliance responsibility that an organization must bear. The intent of this paper is to showcase how much easier PCI DSS compliance is to achieve when customers take advantage of Azure SQL Database.