Large merchants who feel battle scarred after years of implementing new security technologies and procedures may be hesitant about undertaking yet another implementation to add E2EE and tokenization to their systems. In this case, however, the hesitation is unjustified; the service-based approach to bringing E2EE or tokenization or both to a merchant’s environment is surprisingly simple.

There are only four potential activities for a merchant to do in order to add the benefit of these technologies in a service-based scenario, and depending on the merchant’s current data environment and business processes, it may not even be necessary to undertake all four steps. The implementation process goes like this:

1. Discover and convert legacy data stored in a data warehouse to token numbers only if needed
2. Modify the message specification that is sent to the processor
3. Embed encryption if needed or desired
4. Make minor modifications to business processes only if needed