Payment Card Assessments

It’s the end of 2025. What are you doing to make your PCI DSS Compliance program better for 2026? If you’re tired of running an annual PCI DSS fire drill, keep reading.

We know what the PCI DSS fire drill is like.

It’s awful.

Stressful.

In fact, I wanted to quit my role as a PCI ISA at least 15 times a day.

After completing not one but two Report on Compliance Assessments in one calendar year, I was ready to ditch anything that had to do with PCI DSS compliance.

But instead of quitting, I took it up as a challenge to create a best in class PCI Compliance program.

One that even our acquirer said was “impressive.”

And who doesn’t want to be impressive?

Here’s 5 Tweaks That Will Stop the PCI DSS Fire Drill

1. Train your people on PCI DSS Compliance. Training goes a long, long way to the success of your program. From your most junior staff members to the CISO and even your CEO, PCI DSS Compliance Essentials goes a long way to build a successful compliance program.
2. Automate reporting from your critical security tool set. Trust us, it makes providing evidence for logging, vulnerability management, change management, etc., so much easier. And you’ll know when the security control is failing a lot sooner when you automate alerts.
3. In the wake of significant third party service provider breaches and outages, getting a grip on your third party vendor program is vital. Not only do we have a specialized on demand course for vendor management, but we have helpful templates that you can use right now.
4. Reducing and managing your PCI Assessment scope may just save you from chronic heartburn. Scope remains the most challenging aspect of PCI DSS compliance. Again, we have a specialized on demand course, a guidebook, and inventory templates you can use today to get a grip on scope once and for all.
5. Partner with Payment Card Assessments. We can help in so many ways:
   • Introductory scope review
   • Full blown scope assessment
   • Gap assessment
   • Mock RoC (Get QSA ready!)
   • Training
   • Documentation templates
   • Implementation of PCI Compliance 365

How can we help you better prepare for PCI Compliance success in 2026?