Sportsbet reduces pain of PCI compliance

PCI compliance – the body of regulations applying to businesses that process credit and debit card payments – “absolutely annoys the living crap” out of Scott Rosicka.

But Rosicka says he has found a way to ease the pain of making sure that Sportsbet.com.au – where Rosicka is the lead systems engineer – doesn’t fall afoul of the auditors that conduct annual checks on the business’ PCI compliance.

Rosicka is some four weeks into the deployment of Splunk, an extensible platform designed to index, search and analyse machine-generated data, as well as provide data visualisations. Deploying the system has provided a mechanism for the organisation to generate reports for PCI auditors that can be used to asses compliance with the standards.

Before the business deployed the system, centralised logging was done “only by requirement” to meet the need of various shades of auditor. There was no capability to use logs to assess trends, and the company had a complex alerting system for when something went wrong with a server or other piece of infrastructure.

Rosicka told the SplunkLive! Sydney conference that now “everything” is either in, or going to be put into, Splunk, which creates a centralised way of compiling, correlating, indexing and produce visualisations of disparate data sources.

If his team finds something that’s not in Splunk, Rosicka told the conference, “it’s going to be going in there”.

The platform has let Rosicka create repeatable searches to meet compliance needs, but also offers the business greater insight into any performance differences that emerge between its production, development and load testing systems, and better visibility of security incidents.

Sportsbet.com.au is also starting to use the technology to analyse its virtualized infrastructure. “We’re growing at a huge rate,” Rosicka explained. “It’s easier to get a purchase order signed off than it is to get the infrastructure implemented just because we’re working at such a fast pace.”

His team are using Splunk to monitor resource usage by VMware virtual machines to assess emerging infrastructure pain points.