I agree that tokenization is ‘the single biggest change in payments” and I think that data tokenization is bigger than “change in payments” and should also be used as the new approach for securing all sensitive identifying personal data.

I agree that “The idea of taking the actual account number out of the flow, common sense is that’s a good thing, especially in the light of the data compromises that we’ve seen” There are so many ways to attack our sensitive data at different points across the entire data flow.

We know that highly sophisticated malware was used in many recent attacks. McAfee Labs researchers have analyzed threats and seen a steady growth in malware. Sophisticated malware can be difficult to detect and poses as approved legitimate software. I think we need to protect the data itself, against the new memory scraping malware, in transit, at rest and even in use in computer memory.

I think that the fact that “the token infrastructure can make decisions on who you want to give access to” is a powerful approach to manage security risk. Recent studies reported that data tokenization can cut security incidents by 50 %. I think it is time to secure the sensitive data in the entire data flow with modern approaches.

Ulf Mattsson, CTO Protegrity