A contract for Unisys to provide its Stealth Solution data protection technology to car rental company Hertz New Zealand will be the first time the technology has been sold outside the US.
Hertz will use the Stealth Solution to help secure and protect customers’ credit card data against fraud.
Stealth is patent-pending and became commercially available only last year, says Paul Head-McNeal, Unisys Stealth programme manager for Asia Pacific.
It was developed in 2005 for the US Department of Defense.
Stealth comes in two suites: one for data in motion on the network, the other for data at rest in storage.
“It’s multi-layer security,” Head-McNeal says. “Users can be added to a community of interest but they need a key to engage.
“Once the data is encrypted it is bit-split, residing in multiple data shares. The user key reconstructs the data and a second key turns it into its original form.”
Stealth uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit encryption in addition to breaking the information apart into multiple slices (“bit–splitting”) before they are transmitted through the network or saved on a disk.
Hertz New Zealand is part of one of the largest global car rental companies, with more than 40 physical locations across New Zealand as well as a 24-hour online booking system. Its customers rely on credit cards as a convenient way to pay for vehicle rentals.
Because of this, Hertz must comply with the worldwide Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which is designed to prevent credit card fraud through increased controls around credit card data.
“We take the protection of our customer data seriously, both to protect our clients from being vulnerable to credit card fraud and to preserve their trust in the Hertz brand. We selected the Unisys Stealth Solution because its extra-strength security allows us to exceed the Payment Card Industry requirements to protect credit card data,” says Chris Rusden, region vice president and managing director, Hertz Australasia.
The deal provides Hertz with the ability to use the solution for up to five years. It builds on an existing relationship with Unisys, through which Unisys already provides a range of IT managed services, including hosting a Unisys ClearPath Libra Model 400 server to support a number of Hertz’s mission-critical applications. To comment on this article, please email the editor.
Follow CIO on
Twitter @cio_nz
Sign up to receive CIO newsletters.
Click here to subscribe to CIO.
Join the CIO New Zealand group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.