Food City, Super Dollar stores adopt Tripwire PCI DSS compliance solution

Portland, Ore. Tripwire, leading provider of IT security and compliance automation solutions, announced Monday that K-VA-T Food Stores, a regional supermarket chain of 105 stores in Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee, has adopted Tripwire Enterprise as part of its initiative to automate processes for compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

The retailer, which operates the Food City and Super Dollar stores, is a Level 1 PCI operation that serves more than 2.5 million customers and conducts tens of millions of card transactions across high-density, point-of-sale network systems.

With the scope of PCI compliance growing beyond the company’s desire to manage it manually, K-VA-T surveyed several compliance software options -- with a clear goal that any new software "do no harm" to their high-performing systems. They chose Tripwire Enterprise because it offered the best solution for their retail environment, with the tipping point being that the performance of point-of-sale systems would not be affected or slowed down in any way.

"While automating for PCI compliance was the main catalyst for implementing Tripwire Enterprise, we also leverage its capabilities for file integrity monitoring, tracking logins and enhancing security," said Paul Widener, VP information services, K-VA-T Food Stores. "The robustness of the software, and the ease with which it runs on our systems, are very impressive, and we can customize it to suit our environment."

Tripwire Enterprise also allows the K-VA-T's system administrators to develop of hierarchy of issues to be investigated, categorizing certain changes as regular occurrences, and tagging others as needing investigation -- with Tripwire Enterprise providing the audit trail for easy troubleshooting. This has significantly streamlined IT operations.

"Tripwire Enterprise has given us the ability to use resources more efficiently. We’ve even reduced our overhead on target devices. Pound for pound, you can never do manually what Tripwire Enterprise accomplishes automatically," Widener said.