Thales Debuts Cloud-Based Payment Service

French multinational tech firm Thales has unveiled a tool to help customers adopt a cloud-based payments infrastructure.

Announced Tuesday (Aug. 22), the Thales payShield Cloud HSM is a subscription-based digital payments security service built using the company’s payShield 10K Payment Hardware Security Module (HSM) technology.

“Across industries and geographies, digital services are steadily transitioning from on-premises to cloud-based offerings. Payment solutions are no exception,” Todd Moore, vice president of data security products at Thales, said in a news release.

“Our cloud-based payShield 10K HSM service provides a new, flexible and fully-compliant solution for facilitating digital and face-to-face payments.”

Thales calls its payShield service an alternative way for companies to meet their payment security needs, simplifying the sharing of production HSMs across multiple locations and applications, allowing more HSMs to “be added quickly for resilience, backup or capacity.”

The launch comes as the payments industry notices the risks of relying on legacy infrastructure systems to power their networks as cloud-based offerings become more common, as PYMNTS wrote in June.

“[Migrating to the cloud] brings forward a lot of leading-edge technologies that were previously relegated to new entrants,” Dondi Black, executive vice president and chief product officer at TSYS, said during a discussion with Eitan Ahimor, global payments business development at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“It’s been really effective when we think about the opportunity for financial institutions to compete directly with new entrants to the sector,” Black said.

Ahimor stressed that the “value in payments is being delivered to the end-user through the value chain,” which means that optimal integration between payment ecosystem players is crucial to providing value.

And because sensitive information is exchanged along the payments value chain, it needs to be highly secured and encrypted both when addressed and in transit.

“When these workloads are sitting on a cloud, the payments players can effectively centralize their data in a secure and reliable manner that allows them to share it with the relevant parties who have the right permissions, providing access to the most up-to-date information in real time, which has the downstream effect of both more products being built and a better customer experience,” Ahimor said

Last month, Thales announced it had purchased cybersecurity firm Imperva from owner Thoma Bravo for $3.6 billion.

The deal is designed to strengthen Thales’ digital identity and cybersecurity business, improve its data security capabilities and help the company access the lucrative application security market.

“With this acquisition, we are seizing a unique opportunity to accelerate our cybersecurity capabilities and are taking an important step towards our ambition to build a world-class global cybersecurity integrated player, providing a comprehensive portfolio of products and services,” Thales CEO Patrick Caine said in a news release.