If you're wondering exactly what is PCI compliance, the chances are you're one of the many business owners in Australia who've asked themselves this same question. Before answering this question, it's useful to begin by looking at what PCI (and its counterpart DSS) stands for.

As we noted in last year's CSO article, "Six ways we gave up our privacy," people are increasingly -- and willingly -- throwing their privacy to the wind, thanks to an addiction to Google apps, GPS devices, the BlackBerry, iPhone and Android, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Some security experts believe privacy is dead already.

Payment card industry (PCI) compliance knowledge is sorely lacking among Australian companies and needs to improve before the next deadline later this year, according to Bridge Point Communications director, Tim Smith.

Beginning Sept. 30, Visa will require merchants and related businesses to conduct wireless security scans to prove compliance with version 1.2 of the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) which is designed to safeguard cardholder data from wireless threats.

Security vendors are launching a gazillion products this week at RSA Conference 2010, but hidden in all of those press releases are a few nuggets that illustrate the big picture trends.

To use Cloud computing securely requires companies to know where their data is stored and who has access to it. Ironically, the reason Cloud is so popular is because organisations don't want to worry about these details.

So can the issue be solved by adhering to standards? Increasing legislation? Maybe we need a global technical disaster to ‘sober up’ an industry drunk on the power of Moore's Law.