gorgon2k

HI guys have a bit of a logic question. I have a client that does event registration on sites A. B. and C. and they would like to start taking payments for the registrations. Now it would be a bit outlandish to create a payment platform on each site so I'm thinking of handling all the payments on an external source say, site D. now, what i'd need to do is create some sort of API that will receive payment data and handle it accordingly (I.E. process, reject, return messages etc.). My biggest concern is A. the security of this (PCI Compliancy) and B. really differentiating between clients (site A. B. and C.) and the possibility to vastly expand in the future. My understanding is that there needs to be some sort of handshake(TLS handshake?) from one server to another. I think most importantly it's getting the information from the servers of site A. B. and C. to the server of site D. securely. On site D. I would use a payment library and framework to manage/handle the payments and return a payment status. Am I understanding this correctly? Am I missing anything? Am I completely off base and risking alot? Thanks guys... P.S. if there's any consultants out there that are very good and have experience in this field, and are from the U.S. feel free to get in touch, I do pay.

Ok guys I was approached by a client to create a web service that will allow users to sort through a bunch of proprietary data. This is all fine and dandy but the catch is, all of this data comes from software they have installed on local servers at their location. I'm thinking of writing a cron job to receive and parse the data at a set interval. The data can be accessed by way of an ODBC protocol but what I need to figure out is how the hell I'm going to get the data from the local server to a remote server. My initial thinking is, is it possible to straight connect to the local server, from PHP using the odbc_connect feature but I guess some how I'd need to have an address for the local server that is public facing? If this isn't an option would the next best thing be something that can parse the data and server it up, online, to be accessed via the remote server? I'm not much of an "I.T." guy so I'm not sure how I'd even go about making this local server accesible from the internet. Does any of this seem possible or do you guys know of any better options? Thanks!