PF.com recently interviewed Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of payments platform provider and payment facilitator BlueSnap, regarding the driving force behind all the consolidation happening in the industry. In Dangelmaier’s view, much of the driving force behind the consolidation can be traced to the pressure retailers are feeling.
Vision 2020: Favorable for PFs with 23 States Signing on For Licensing Agreement
The Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) and its Fintech Industry Advisory Panel created a plan back in 2017 to develop a consistent framework for regulating non-bank entities across states. They called it Vision 2020. And as 2020 starts to sneak up on us at what seems to be a rapid pace, the momentum continues towards this common goal.
Visa Takes Digital to Africa; Google and PayPal Enhance Shared Offerings: News Roundup
PaymentFacilitator’sNews Roundup is a curated mix of the past week’s news and articles from around the web, including company announcements, global payments news, and other coverage and analysis of topics relevant to payment facilitators.
Can Technology Platforms Really Help?
In this podcast, Frank Lynch, VP of Sales for Infinicept discusses “Can Technology Platforms Really Help?”.
Egypt’s Central Bank Demonstrates Support for PFs with New Regulations
The Central Bank of Egypt is opening the door for payment facilitators in the country with new regulations governing their operation there.
Celero Commerce Acquisitions, Razorpay Funding and More: Summer Heats Up with Industry Activity
The first half of this year kicked off with some big-name activity in payments industry investment and mergers, leading to plenty of anticipation about what’s coming next in the U.S. and globally. So far this summer, the activity isn’t taking a vacation.
Introducing Shopify Fulfillment; Stripe and Xero Join Forces on Behalf of SMBs: News Roundup
PaymentFacilitator’sNews Roundup is a curated mix of the past week’s news and articles from around the web, including company announcements, global payments news, and other coverage and analysis of topics relevant to payment facilitators.
Improving your security posture with “Software-First” Intent-Based Networking (Part 2)
Core components to improving your security posture through Intent-Based Networking include a single source of truth, continuous real-time validation and the ability to swap or upgrade devices quickly. These components are not enough, though.
Audit, time machine, and roll-back your infrastructure
Without a single source of truth, it is impossible to properly audit all changes that are taking place across your infrastructure. And without a proper audit, it is impossible to know whether your infrastructure has been compromised. With Intent-Based Networking, not only do you have one source of truth, but because all changes are done through software, they’re all recorded. You can go back to an audit trail, or even go back in time through a “time machine” like functionality. Doing so helps improve your security posture at many levels:
- You have the ability to monitor your audit trail for any suspicious activities
- Your Intent-Based Networking system can be programmed to look for suspicious activities. Examples of such activities that the system can easily detect are: the creation of new agents and processes; or changes to agents that enables them to accept incoming connections.
- When you do witness suspicious activity, your Intent-Based Networking system can automatically raise an alarm, or allow you to roll back to a known “safe” state.
Never, ever log into a device!
In today’s world, operators log into devices, and use the Command Line Interface (CLI) to make changes, or debug problems. This approach is fundamentally broken and insecure because it is far too easy for bad actors to take control of the devices.
With an Intent-Based Networking system, operators never log into a device. Moreover, devices never accept incoming connections. Devices only talk to the Intent-Based Networking system, which controls and protects the connection to those devices.
Properly secure, distributed architecture
Last but not least, none of this would matter if your Intent-Based Networking solution itself gets compromised. This is why a proper security posture also requires architecting the solution itself with security in mind. Apstra AOS is a software-first distributed system, which consists of many processes, each process only connecting to the Graph Datastore with secure, encrypted connections. The processes themselves do not accept any incoming connections; and the distributed data store authenticates connections and imposes access control.
Improve your security posture by adopting Intent-Based Networking and a “Software-First” approach
With security being of paramount concern, organizations should build their infrastructures with security as a top priority. By taking a “software-first” approach and deploying Intent-Based Networking, organizations can make quick progress in terms of their security posture by avoiding some of the most common causes of security mishaps — including lack of visibility, lack of consistency and uniformity, lack of accountability, and inability to resolve problems quickly when they arise.
Intent-Based Networking forces discipline into the operational model, driven at the core by a single source of truth. The single source of truth guarantees uniformity of policy and consistency of workflows; it is the foundation of real-time continuous validation tests; and it ensures visibility and dramatically reduces the mean time to insight when problems and security vulnerabilities do occur. It reliably prevents many security problems. Intent-Based Networking also helps to fix problems quickly when they arise, either by swapping devices quickly, upgrading software, or reverting to a known state.
In summary, Intent-Based Networking can dramatically improve organizations’ security posture. This is in addition to Intent-Based Networking’s proven benefits in delivering an order of magnitude acceleration in business velocity, an order of magnitude improvement in infrastructure reliability and an 83% reduction in costs.
If you’re interested in joining our Fortune 500 customers who are well on their way to transforming their infrastructures using a software-first approach, please contact us — we’d love to hear from you!
[Read the first blog in this two part series here]
Don’t Hit Mosquitoes with Sledgehammers: What Merchants Want from PFs and How Tools Can Get Them There
Which technology tools are critical to payment facilitator success today? In a panel discussion at PF WORLD 2019 hosted by Deana Rich, CEO and founder of Rich Consulting and co-founder of Infinicept, experts talked about how tools are enabling PFs to build better businesses.
Alipay Enables QR Interoperability – The New Global Buzzword
Digital wallet startup Alipay has partnered with six prominent mobile wallets across Europe to collaborate on QR. The goal? A unified QR code-based digital payment system targeting travelers in both Europe and China