nuBridges announced nuBridges Protect Tokenization as a Service (TaaS), a cloud-based tokenization service for national and multi-national companies that want to protect personally identifiable information and electronic health records to improve security, reduce risk, ease compliance and minimize data security costs.

Hosted by Verizon Business on its Computing as a Service platform, the new service is equally adept at protecting payment cards to help merchants comply with the PCI DSS.

nuBridges Protect TaaS is a managed tokenization service that uses nuBridges Protect Token Manager to protect credit cards and other types of structured sensitive data such as social security numbers, National Insurance Numbers, driver's licenses, passports, salaries, addresses, account numbers and credit card numbers in a PCI-compliant cloud.

To use the service, customers enable one or more of their systems to interact with it via web services. Administration, configuration, key management and operations are handled by nuBridges to relieve customers of day-to-day data security tasks related to data tokenization.

nuBridges guarantees customers ownership of their tokenized data, including the token/data relationship, should the service contract be cancelled. What's more, companies that use the service can still use their payment gateway and payment processors of choice.

nuBridges Protect TaaS provides several other benefits to merchants, financial services, insurance and hospitality companies and health care organizations, including the following:

• Reduces PCI DSS scope – Since credit cards are no longer stored on-site, most systems are taken out of scope, thereby minimizing an organization's internal cardholder data environment and reducing the cost of compliance.
• Implements cost savings – It eliminates most of the up-front costs associated with implementing a tokenization solution, including software and hardware procurement. Monthly usage fees spread costs out over time.
• Reduces management requirements – It reduces IT management requirements since most of the tokenization implementation, operational and monitoring functions are handled by nuBridges.
• Retains referential integrity – nuBridges maps tokens to credit card numbers; not to transactions as many other tokenization outsourcers do. Because nuBridges TaaS maintains referential integrity – a 1:1 relationship – between sensitive data and tokens, sales and marketing analysis, fraud analysis, and other mission critical business functions can be performed as usual.
• Limitless data retention – Unlike other tokenization outsources, nuBridges will store data for customers for as long as desired. Other outsourcers typically maintain 24 months of data even though most customers need to retain up to seven years of data for audits.