In September 2009, RSA and First Data, a global leader in electronic commerce and payment processing services, announced that they are partnering to develop First Data Secure Transaction Management, a tokenization-based service designed to reduce organizational risk and ease the process of complying with PCI DSS.

First Data Secure is powered by the RSA SafeProxy© architecture, which employs a unique combination of tokenization, advanced encryption, and public-key technologies to provide merchants with the ability to eliminate credit card data from their environments without loss of business functionality or massive rewrites of applications.

According to Art Coviello, executive vice president of EMC Corporation and president of RSA, The Security Division of EMC, "This fruit of our partnership with First Data will provide organizations with a simplified and scalable solution for payment card protection that drastically reduces management complexity and costs. We look forward to a continuing and mutually rewarding collaboration."

Tokenizaton vs. tokens

Though the term "aliasing" is also sometimes used, "tokenization" has become the most common term for the substitution of sensitive data with a random numeric value. Though the terms are similar, tokenization in this sense is different from RSA SecurID tokens, which employ randomly generated numbers for strong authentication. RSA follows industry practice in using the term tokenization, while acknowledging the need to distinguish between tokenization and SecurID tokens, given the latter's widespread success and deployment. The price of success!