Tokenisation

Tokenisation swaps a sensitive value for a meaningless substitute, so most of your systems never hold the real thing at all.

The card number lives in one vault; everything else carries a token that is useless if stolen. The benefit is not better protection of the sensitive data, it is that the number of systems holding it collapses, which shrinks the scope of everything: the breach, the audit, the assessment.

Checked against the primary source.

More on Data protection & privacy