June 2024

The global economy is undergoing enormous shifts, and increasingly, enterprises around the world need to tread a fine line between cost-cutting and ensuring operational efficiencies. Businesses handling payments in vast volumes, like Fuel, Hotel and Retail enterprises are now realising the benefits of outsourcing payment processing and security demands to Managed Service Providers. But in a fiercely crowded market, it can be difficult to cut through the noise to find the right partner for your unique business needs. Evolve is monumentally different to other Managed Service Providers in the market for three key reasons: · With more than 20 years of experience in helping companies achieve PCI compliance, nobody can match Evolve’s level of experience with PCI. Evolve is an SD-WAN global Platinum Partner for Mako Networks, which is certified to PCI DSS Level 1, the strongest payment data security standard in the world. · Evolve spans the gap between IT companies and payment aggregators. Nobody expects IT companies to be payment experts or vice versa. That’s where Evolve comes in, with its PCI compliance and payment processing expertise, it’s been connecting the two industries for years, solving payment problems for IT companies and helping payment companies expand and strengthen their network connections. · Evolve’s unrivalled ability to manage third-party data centre hardware and software integrations and migrations, its reputation for protecting data assets and data and the trust placed in the team by data centre owners around the world. Evolve has links and access to two of the world’s biggest payment aggregators, hundreds of banks and payment providers worldwide. It knows what it takes to route payments to where they need to get to, and how to protect them end-to-end. Evolve has everything in place to connect your business to any payment provider you want to use. What’s more, it is trusted by more than 60 gateways, platforms and hosts around the world to work directly within their data centres, handling intricate lease lines and physical hardware installations, and connecting their payments to where they need to get. No other Managed Service Provider can offer this combination of capabilities. Another reason Evolve stands head and shoulders above the competition is the trust placed in it, not just by data centres, but by device manufacturers who want to be sure that their products are distributed only by credible and respected brands. That’s why Evolve was chosen by network management company Mako to offer the only PCI DSS Level 1-certified SD Wan device in the world. Why is that important? Because it provides an extra layer of security for businesses carrying out card payments. Why Evolve’s SD-WAN strengths are unrivalled: · Software: Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) is a transformative technology, revolutionising the way enterprises manage and optimise their network infrastructure. Before SD-WAN emerged, businesses would typically use traditional Wide Area Networking (WAN) architectures. With the implementation of cloud-based applications, the increase in remote working trends, and the increasing need for reliable and high-performing connections, traditional WANs are often limited in their scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. · SD-WAN overcomes these challenges by leveraging software-defined principles to enhance the management, security, and performance of WAN connections, enhancing network connectivity to intelligently direct traffic across the WAN. SD-WAN can choose the most suitable path for data transmission, considering factors such as latency, bandwidth, and application requirements, prioritising critical applications over less important ones to optimise performance. · SD-WAN also offers a centralised management system, allowing control of devices, network policies, and configurations that can be managed and implemented across the entire network, simply by administration.Evolve combines Mako’s SD-WAN technology with an enhanced service and support package, supporting broadband and LTE connections with dynamic routing for optimised network traffic. This enables each of its customers’ sites to connect directly to the SD-WAN kit at each third-party data centre, keeping operations smooth and secure, while cutting out any complicated routing that could slow down processes. Evolve’s carrier relationships help reduce downtime, too, and all this is backed up by a proactive 24/7/365 multilingual support desk team. By adding the PCI-certified Mako solution to a third party’s data centre, Evolve can extend its SD-WAN into its business. This is a new, faster and more secure way for businesses to manage connections between their different locations, such as offices, data centres, and remote workers. Evolve’s SD-WAN’s strengths alone make it an industry leader, but combined with its data centre integration expertise and payment connectivity coverage, it stands out as the only MSP that can offer enterprise-level payment-accepting businesses everything they’re looking for. Vision – total visibility over your entire network Another way Evolve’s capabilities can help drive increased revenue for your business is through its proprietary Vision Host Monitoring Platform. Vision gives 360-degree visibility of an entire network, including all third-party devices that pass through the SD-WAN device, through a single dashboard, and is supported by our 24/7 Network Operations Centre (NOC). Vision uses the capabilities of the EvolveWAN device to monitor the whole network of your company. Here’s how Vision works in practice: Let’s say your Hospitality business operates a loyalty card programme. Vision can automatically detect an issue with connectivity to your business loyalty platform. The Vision platform instantly raises a ticket in the Evolve system and alerts the Evolve NOC. A member of Evolve’s 24/7 support team in the NOC immediately calls your business’s service desk, providing a description of the problem and helping to resolve it. Your business’s service desk then speaks to the third-party provider, who resolves the issue within minutes, comfortably ahead of your business opening for the day, avoiding issues at the peak breakfast rush and a lot of unhappy customers. What’s more, Vision’s reporting capabilities can generate bespoke reports showing performance, uptime and downtime stats of vendors’ platforms for you and your third-party provider. Ultimately, businesses that use Vision benefit from streamlined operations, increased revenue and customer satisfaction. All of this is backed up by a friendly, 24/7 multilingual support team that is on hand to help with

If your business takes card payments, chances are you’re familiar with PCI DSS. But if you’re handling compliance processes by yourself, you may not be aware of recent updates, and what it means for your business. Here, Evolve takes you through what’s new in PCI DSS, and how we can help you navigate an easy path to compliance. PCI compliance refers to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which applies to any company that takes card payments. It’s a set of security standards designed to ensure all companies that accept, process, store, or transmit card information securely and protect cardholder information from theft, hacking, data breaches and other security threats. Failing to comply with PCI standards can result in hefty fines, damage to reputation, and even legal consequences. Whether you’re a large corporation or a small business, it’s important to take PCI compliance seriously. So, what do you need to do to become – and stay – compliant? PCI DSS is applied to organisations based on the number and type of card transactions they make each year. PCI DSS Level 1 ensures the highest level of security for businesses that store, transmit, or process credit card data. A Level 1 merchant is defined as processing at least 1 million JCB card transactions, 2.5 million American Express transactions, or 6 million Visa, Mastercard and Discover transactions per year. Following an on-site audit, PCI Level 1 merchants and service providers must obtain an annual Compliance Report from a Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) or Internal Security Assessor (ISA) to comply with PCI DSS. But merchants have an extra layer of responsibility when it comes to PCI compliance; they are responsible for ensuring their cards, payments, and internet service providers (ISPs) are compliant to ensure the security of their cardholder environments against data breaches. The latest PCI DSS version 4.0 became mandatory on 1 April 2024. The previous version, PCI DSS 3.2.1. was retired on 31 March 2024, so all card-accepting organisations need to be compliant with PCI DSS 4.0 from now on. Version 4.0 has been launched to account for the massive changes in technology, cybersecurity and the way payments are made over the past few years. You only need to look at how COVID-19 accelerated the shift to contactless payments and how e-commerce changed the way people pay. Around the world, millions of brick-and-mortar or cash-only businesses had to go online and accept cards virtually overnight. Changes that are mandatory as of 1 April 2024 include:· Companies must define and document the scope of their cardholder data environment annually and after any significant changes are made.· Any files companies use to create their network infrastructure must be secured.· Companies must have documented requirements that are shared between their organisation and any third-party service providers they have relationships with.But 51 new requirements will be mandatory from April 1 2025. Here, we’ve identified the ones likely to require more work or significant changes to your card acceptance infrastructure.· It will no longer be acceptable to use disk or partition level encryption for any encrypted data that companies store.· Stored hashes of PANs will need to be cryptographically keyed hashes, and companies will be required to produce an inventory of all the cryptography used to protect cardholder data. Companies will also be required to perform an annual risk assessment of all their uses of cryptography.· Any JavaScript in web payment pages must be actively managed and must respond to any unauthorised changes.· Companies will be required to use technology designed to detect and prevent phishing attacks.· Multifactor authentication will be required for all users who can access the cardholder data environment, not just those who have remote or administrative access.· Companies must maintain an inventory of hardware and software, but from 1 April 2025, they must also conduct risk assessments of any assets approaching their end-of-life and replace them where appropriate. Let Evolve manage your PCI DSS 4.0 compliance Traditionally, ensuring PCI compliance is the responsibility of the business. Companies must undergo frequent internal and external security assessments by authorised independent audit institutions to obtain PCI DSS Level 1 certification, including detailed on-site audits every year. Achieving and maintaining PCI DSS compliance can involve enormous operational and technical investments, especially for businesses that don’t have payment infrastructures as part of their core operations. For a business operating in multiple sites, like Fuel Forecourts or Retailers, it can be a logistical nightmare to assess every POS terminal or gateway and the processes that accept card payments. With so many reports, audits and administrative burdens to handle, many companies will be concerned about the amount of money and time it will take to ensure compliance. But there is an easier, cheaper and more efficient way to get PCI-compliant – letting Evolve do the work for you. Founded in 2005 and serving more than 9,500 sites globally in the Retail, Hospitality and Fuel Forecourt industries, Evolve is a fully Managed Service Provider (MSP) operating in 12 countries, offering customers reliable, secure and Level 1-certified PCI DSS SD-WAN solutions. SD-WAN stands for Software-Defined Wide Area Network, a type of networking technology that enables businesses to manage the connections between their different locations, such as offices, data centres, and remote workers. The only PCI DSS Level 1-certified PCI-compliant SD Wan device in the world is Mako’s SD Wan device. As a Mako platinum partner, Evolve provides customised SD-WAN solutions with PCI Level 1 certification for payment security. By combining Mako’s devices with Evolve’s friendly, knowledgeable and multilingual 24/7 support team, you can be assured that your call will always be answered by someone within two minutes. Also, instead of slogging through the 240-question assessment document, for every location, IP address and terminal to get PCI-certified, Evolve will answer them for you. Of those 240 questions, 210 of them – or 90% – are answered by Evolve’s PCI compliance capabilities, so its customers don’t have to worry about them. The team can also guide you on the

Evolve is delighted to have been officially unveiled as the latest Silver Patron of Wigan Youth Zone, supporting their initiatives and the amazing work that goes on there.   For the last year, Evolve has been collaborating with Wigan Youth Zone to be in readiness for the official patronage. Evolve has visited Wigan Youth Zone on multiple occasions over the past year, introducing new team members to the incredible work done at the youth facility. In addition, Evolve attended the Youth Zone’s inaugural business breakfast and will be attending its first business brunch in a few weeks. At Evolve’s quarterly business all-hands meeting, the Wigan Youth Zone team joined Evolve at their Wigan offices to deliver a profile piece. In the heart of the town, Wigan Youth Zone is a purpose-built, cutting-edge youth facility that opened its doors in 2013. It gives young people in the community the chance to make new friends, experience new things, pick up new skills, and get the help they require to realise their full potential. According to statistics, Wigan’s youth have among the lowest rates of physical activity in the nation; over 20% of them are obese, and a startling proportion of them reside in homes with adults who may be abusing drugs or have mental health issues. Seven days a week, the Wigan Youth Zone offers young people a secure space, access to positive adult role models, focused assistance for those in need, chances for professional and personal growth, and generously subsidised wholesome meals. Since the charity’s amazing work depends on donations from local businesses, Evolve, a Wigan-based company, was eager to help. Starting in July with Tough Mudder, Evolve plans to participate in fundraising activities throughout 2024 to generate £6,000 for the Wigan Youth Zone. Any money that the team raises will be matched by Evolve. Evolve has also promised to donate eight hours of their time to the youth facility as mentors and volunteers. Evolve has declared that it is now a member of The 5% Club, an employer-led organisation advocating for more access to “earn and learn” job opportunities and skills training. The goal of the 5% Club is to assist all companies, including its members, in expanding the quantity, calibre, and variety of apprenticeships offered in the UK. Alan Stephenson-Brown, CEO at Evolve Business Group, said: “Nominating Wigan Youth Zone as our charity of the year is a great way for us to support Wigan and Leigh’s young people, helping them to fulfil their potential, raise their aspirations, and prepare for adulthood. This is a mutually beneficial partnership; in the UK, 44% of people prioritise meaningful work over a high salary. Being able to show a positive impact through our support is not only important for existing staff, but it will also support our 5% Club pledge in recruiting apprentices.” Lynsey Heyes, Head of Fundraising at Wigan Youth Zone, added: “We offer hundreds of activities to more than 5,000 members, seven days a week, all year round. But we can’t continue to offer this service without support from throughout the community, whether that be a generous investment from local businesses or donations of time by our volunteers. We are incredibly thankful to the Evolve team for their generous support, which is an investment in the future of Wigan’s next generation.” A recent independent evaluation reported that every £1 invested in Wigan Youth Zone returns a social value of £2.19, and 81% of those who access the charity’s services feel better prepared for the future. Evolve hopes to make a positive impact on the future of Wigan’s young people. Go to the following website to find out more about the incredible job that Wigan Youth Zone does: https://www.wiganyouthzone.org/support-us/our-patrons/ To donate to Evolve’s fundraising endeavours, follow the link here: https://www.justgiving.com/team/evolve-mudders To learn more about Evolve, Visit their website here: https://www.evolvebg.co.uk/ End About Evolve Business Group and Evolve Evolve Business Group is an independently owned company that specialises in providing end-to-end IT and managed network solutions to a range of businesses. Evolve is helping businesses to reduce costs and simplify the management of services and give business owners and their teams more time to do what they do best. Founded in 2005, it has worked with a variety of customers across different industries around the world, building a team of highly experienced specialists to help create effective and efficient packages using any combination of different offerings. It keeps a range of cross-sector networks protected and connected. @evolvebg Visit Evolve’s LinkedIn