Businesses are discouraged from storing credit card data, but many feel the practice is necessary in order to facilitate recurring payments. Merchants that need to store credit card data are doing it for recurring billing.
Using a third party vault provider is the best way to store credit card data for recurring billing, it helps reduce or eliminate the need for electronically stored cardholder data while still maintaining current business processes. The risk of storing card data is removed from your possession and you are given back a token that can be used for the purpose of recurring billing, by utilizing a vault. Modern payment gateways allow card tokenization.
Any business that storing data via hard copy needs to review and follow PCI DSS requirement in order for the electronic storage of cardholder data to be PCI compliant. Appropriate encryption must be applied to the PAN (primary account number). In this situation, the numbers in the electronic file should be encrypted either at the column level, file level or disk level.