Making Payment Card Industry compliance easy and comprehensible for level-4 merchants, on-demand data security and PCI compliance management solution provider Trustwave (www.trustwave.com) has unveiled the latest release of its compliance platform, TrustKeeper.

Level-4 merchants are those that process fewer than 20,000 e-commerce transactions and/or fewer than a million single card transactions per year. According to its Thursday announcement, TrustKeeper 3.0 represents a revolutionary approach to supporting level-4 merchants' efforts to validate compliance with the PCI Data Security Standard, the security requirement for entities that store, process or transmit cardholder data.

"Smaller merchants often do not have the resources or IT experience to manage their compliance initiatives," Trustwave chairman and chief executive officer Robert J. McCullen said in a statement. "Our proprietary technology will facilitate their experience by ensuring that they understand the compliance standard and process, and provide actionable remediation recommendations to manage vulnerabilities and achieve compliance."

Trustwave's web portal moves non-technical merchants easily and efficiently through the compliance process, and profiles their credit card acceptance and information security behavior. Using the information compiled, TrustKeeper 3.0 simplifies and automates the PCI DSS compliance process. If a merchant is found to be non-compliant, TrustKeeper provides actionable recommendations to mitigate any issues to better protect their customer's data.

In developing TrustKeeper 3.0, compliance division general manager Doug Klotnia said Trustwave worked with a number of smaller merchants to understand their security and compliance needs. "This new platform provides tools throughout the compliance process to support and facilitate merchant validation and allows program sponsors to effectively manage large-scale programs with added ease and functionality," he said in a statement.