Voices of WineDirect; Volume 4: Ken Escueta

This is the fourth installment in a series titled Voices of WineDirect, where members of our team will discuss what excites them about WineDirect and the future of winery direct to consumer (DTC) channels.

In Volume 4, we are pleased to introduce you to Ken Escueta, Director of Platform Engineering at WineDirect. Ken has a sincere passion for building great teams and is serious about security. Living in Vancouver, BC he has 10+ years of technical and hands-on experience steering high-performing teams to enable smooth operations for large enterprises and start-ups experiencing rapid-growth. What Ken loves about WineDirect is that he can use a ton of his IT skills, as well as focus on being the Winery's Champion by safeguarding customer data and keep the platform running at its full potential. He’s also expecting his first child later this year!

Join Ken and I for a chat about the recent security improvements by watching the video below.

Congratulations on the recent PCI DSS Level 1 Compliance achievement! Can you explain why this is so important for WineDirect clients?

With the massive growth in ecommerce last year, the number of online credit card transactions skyrocketed. Together with this growth comes increased security risks to credit card data. We take security very seriously, and have taken the necessary steps to ensure we continue to protect our clients and their customers' data.

A key undertaking that we are excited about is that we achieved Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Service Provider Level 1 Compliance. Level 1 demonstrates the most stringent compliance standard for the safe handling of credit cardholder data. The Attestation of Compliance was granted after a rigorous 8-month audit process. Our clients can rest easy knowing WineDirect has satisfied adherence to the same expectations as large platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce.

Tell us a little bit about what your team is working on as we prepare for the important holiday season?

The security and IT team have done a tremendous amount of work improving the way we monitor our servers in AWS and upgrading our databases for peak performance. We have been upgrading our servers with the latest security patches while also adding in some stability updates during off-peak times to keep the platform running smoothly. Our team has been focused on getting all our databases in tip-top shape before the important holiday season.

We have a team dedicated to security and are laser focused on proactive security enhancements. It’s important that we do everything possible to safeguard customer data as a key part of our promise to be The Winery’s Champion. We will continue to diligently review and evolve security policies, practices, and infrastructure frequently.

Can you tell us a bit about other improvements to security?

We currently have the most advanced version of reCAPTCHA in beta and are looking forward to rolling this out to all our customers using the latest checkout tools very soon. It adds a brand-new layer of fraud protection and security to your website checkout. This invisible version works to detect bots in the background and returns a risk score that tells the WineDirect system if the interaction is suspicious and could indicate a bot user. It scores traffic with its Adaptive Risk Analysis Engine and does not force your consumers to perform interactive challenges (think: select all crosswalks). Checkout experiences will look the same to our clients and their customers, and everyone will be protected from bot attacks. Win-win.