Steps involved in PA DSS gap assessment and Importance of PA DSS gap assessment

PA DSS Gap assessment

The application developer must understand what are the positives and negatives of the application he has designed. This will be understood when the application is thoroughly assessed. PA DSS gap assessment helps in understanding the payment application and identification of flaws or weak spots within the application. These weak spots can lead to data breaches or the loss of confidential data. It identifies these flaws and fixing these flaws can make the application robust against cyber-attacks.

Steps involved in PA DSS gap assessment:

There are certain security aspects that the software designer needs to follow critically while developing their payment application. The different steps involved in the gap assessment include:

Define scope: Defining the scope helps to understand the different important areas where the software developer needs to focus while designing the application. Using this data the software designer can prioritize the task and improvise their application.

Define the goal: One of the important steps in assessment is to define the goal, to define what type of application is needed with what level of security. Setting proper goals takes the developer a step closer to its achievement. Based on their goals, the application developer can make proper use of various services, equipment, etc. to achieve their set goals.

Documentation: PA DSS gap assessment helps to generate a lot of important documents essential for getting the PA DSS compliance. These documents are also useful even while upgrading the security levels of the payment application in the future.

Remediation: It is the final step in the PA DSS gap assessment. In this, all the gaps found during the assessment are prioritized and fixed. The application developed after fixing the issues is of higher security standards and can prevent a data breach.

The PA DSS gap assessment is one of the main tasks performed to get the PA DSS compliance. All the payment applications should understand the importance of doing this gap analysis if they want to get compliance. Following the right steps towards getting the compliance will help the application developer to save a lot of time and money.