Secure With Soltrus

Enter Soltrus Inc. The Toronto-based company is quickly becoming one of Canada’s most trusted names in Internet security. Its mission: to provide enterprises with the technology that enables businesses and consumers to communicate and transact over digital networks in a secure manner. “The business we are in is Internet security and digital trust,” says Soltrus Product Marketing Manager, Riza Chui. “Businesses come to us because they want to do business on the Internet more effectively and more securely.” They use Soltrus technology to help allay the fears that consumers harbor about engaging in E-commerce and instill consumer confidence in their businesses.

Products

In partnership with Internet security leader VeriSign (and as its exclusive Canadian affiliate), Soltrus offers a wide range of products and services that enterprises can use to help them conduct secure transactions and communications online. One of its flagship products is its line of VeriSign Server ID’s. The Server ID’s provide Web site authentication and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption of all Web-based transactions and communications. The Secure Server ID ($525 annual fee) provides encryption at 40-bit to 128-bit levels, while the Global Server ID ($1,299 annual fee) runs 128-bit exclusively.

In order to win the confidence of consumers and overcome their security concerns, enterprises (especially those in the small and medium-sized enterprise [SME] market) need to convince their customers that their site is both safe and reputable. An important first step is full authentication of your Web business. With the purchase of a VeriSign Server ID, authentication is officially recognized with a VeriSign/Soltrus Web site seal. “When you see the VeriSign or Soltrus site seal, it means we have actually done a third party audit of that business,” says Chui. “That site seal signifies to the Web site’s users that the Web site is legitimate, that a trusted third party has authenticated them and that it is OK to send private information such as credit cards and e-mail addresses.” Importantly, “it instills that sense of trust when there is no face to face interaction between the user and the business.”

Once you have established that your Web site is legitimate, your enterprise will want to communicate and conduct transactions with your customers. The Server ID’s provide Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption of your Web site and all Web-based communications and transactions. They “allow businesses to secure their Web sites and encrypt any communications that their customers send them via web browsers,” says Chui. So whether you are selling products or exchanging sensitive information, it is heavily encrypted to ensure maximum security. To give an idea of the encryption strength: 128-bit encryption would take roughly 1 trillion x 1 trillion years to crack with existing technology!

Authentication and encryption are important first steps towards building the confidence of your customers. But what happens when your business wants to start taking credit card payments online? Soltrus’ answer is the VeriSign Payflow products. Payflow is an Internet payment gateway that allows merchants to accept credit cards online in real time. Chui explains that many SME merchants allow customers to pay with credit cards online. But what is really happening is that customers are submitting their credit card information and the merchant is taking that information and entering it into a physical point-of-sale (POS) terminal. This process is not only cumbersome, but can be fraught with security risks.

The Payflow products are E-commerce solutions designed to streamline and fully automate the payment process. Payflow provides enterprises with seamless payment processing solutions that are customizable, scalable, robust and highly secure. Explains Chui, “Payflow basically replaces the POS terminal - (with) a virtual POS terminal that a merchant can allow its customers to enter their own credit card information. Once it’s set up, there is no involvement on the part of the merchant and Payflow takes that customer’s credit card information and passes that data to the processing and financial network to be processed.” And as to be expected, the transactions are entirely secure. “Everything is secure because we have all the VeriSign security protocols in place,” says Chui.

Enterprises have a choice between Payflow Pro and Payflow Link.

Chui explains that the Payflow Link is “targeted for smaller and medium-sized merchants and also merchants who might not have a lot of resources or technical skills.” It is a complete outsourced payment processing solution that is designed to accommodate merchants that process up to 1,000 transactions a month. Payflow Link consists of a simple HTML tag that merchants place on their web site. When a customer clicks on a link with the embedded HTML tag, Payflow Link takes over and begins to conduct the transaction.

Chui describes the process in further detail: “When the customer clicks on that link, it actually sends the customer to a page that is hosted at VeriSign and enters in payment details…so the checkout page is actually hosted at VeriSign.” The merchant simply sits back and lets Soltrus/VeriSign take over. The merchant doesn’t have to worry about how to store the customer’s information or whether the transmission of information is secure. “They can basically outsource everything to VeriSign and be secure in knowing that everything is taken care of,” says Chui.

The Payflow Pro product is designed for merchants that typically engage in more than 1,000 transactions in a month. With Payflow Pro, the client software is installed on your system, establishing an SSL (secure socket layer) connection between your merchant storefront application and VeriSign’s payment gateway to securely exchange payment data. Explains Chui, the software is “basically a small communication agent, an API (application program interface) that allows the merchant to integrate that tiny little software…right into the Web site, right into their shopping cart or E-commerce application…all it does is send the credit information to VeriSign’s backend for processing.”

Payflow Pro is a highly scalable solution that has the advantage of being adaptable across numerous applications and platforms. Payflow Pro is compatible with a number of different E-Commerce platforms - including Miva, IBM and Microsoft. Soltrus even offers integration kits to E-Commerce vendors so that they can pre-integrate Payflow Pro into their shopping cart applications. What these partners/vendors have done is “actually preintegrated Payflow Pro into their shopping cart or E-Commerce applications… (this) makes a lot of sense for the merchant because all they have to do is buy the shopping cart off the shelf and come to us when they are ready to do the credit card transaction,” says Chui.
For a list of Payflow pre-integrated shopping cart applications:

Increased security concerns in the post-September 11th world have led to growing demand for the VeriSign/Soltrus suite of security-conscious products in other vertical sectors of the IT industry such as Web hosting. Soltrus has established partnerships with various Web hosting service providers who have signed on to resell products such as the Server ID’s and Payflow. As Chui explains, “one of the services they want to bundle is the Server ID’s or Payflow. It’s a value-add for them, most of them bundle it in with their services.” And it is a trend that Chui believes is likely to continue. According to Chui, “security spending actually has gone up as a proportion of total IT spending…I don’t think that people are spending less time on it, they are actually spending more resources and more time making sure that they are in a preventative situation rather than a reactive situation.”

Soltrus’ suite of secure E-business and E-commerce solutions delivers exceptional value to its enterprise customer base. In Chui’s view, the sell isn’t very difficult. “The upside of securing a Web site, making sure that nobody can hack and steal any data in transmission, that’s got to be worth more than $525 a year for any business (Secure Server ID).” As Chui emphasizes, “consumer confidence and consumer trust is the key to getting sales online these days…once you have confidence, that directly translates into sales.”

Marketing and Communications manager, Charlene Klein couldn’t agree more. She argues that if SME’s are concerned about making the investment, they should think about the comparative costs of investing in security and the potential damage to a company’s corporate reputation. “All it takes is one time…think of the expense, the repercussions if there was just a single security breach,” says Klein.
Soltrus products are also designed to fit budget needs. “We price both Payflow Link and Payflow Pro on a fixed fee pricing model - that means there are no transactions fees. Why that’s great for merchants is that we are the only Internet payment gateway that prices our services that way. For the merchant, it’s cost effective. They can predict every month what the costs are going to be.”