What's PCI (News - Alert) DSS? Glad you asked.

According to officials of Storacall Voice Systems, it's "a set of comprehensive requirements for enhancing payment account data security." The PCI DSS must be met by all organizations (merchants and service providers) that transmit, process or store payment card data.

It was developed by the founding payment brands of the PCI Security Standards Council, including American Express (News - Alert), JCB International, MasterCard and Visa to help facilitate the broad adoption of consistent data security measures on a global basis.

Compliance becomes an issue when many organizations that are required to record telephone conversations also take credit card details over the phone from clients. As Storacall officials say, at this point "the recording and storage of this data can become a PCI compliance issue."The new VoiStore CCM (News - Alert) call recorder from Storacall is designed to allow the credit card information of any telephone call to be masked from being recorded by entering a code on the telephone keypad to start the masking, and then after the data has been collected, another code is inputted to stop the masking.

Storacall officials give an example of how it works:

The agent is about to take a credit card payment. They request that the client input *123, or whatever code the client prefers, to start the masking. The agent is recorded, so if the client enters the wrong number the business can prove they were in compliance. Once the credit card details have been taken the agent then inputs an alternative code and the recording resumes."The nice thing about this feature is that the recording doesn't stop," Storacall officials say: "When you play back the call from VoiStore you hear the agent asking the client to input the code, and then the call goes silent. It continues to play in real time, and once the agent has input the resume code, the audio can be heard."

The application software is built around open standards technologies and the hardware is based on COM components.