The digital era of online shopping and electronic transactions is a delightful way to fulfill the demands and requirements of customers all over the world. However, a threat that looms over this digital merchandising is one related to unforeseen hacking and cyber attack incidents. Business owners should implement the best eCommerce fraud prevention techniques to provide a secure online buying experience to their customers. And one of the best ways to ensure a safe and secure checkout experience is employing eCommerce cloud security for business websites and mobile applications.
Cloud services are gaining popularity in the digital commerce ecosystem as they offer useful analytics and reporting capabilities that help businesses provide a safe shopping environment for their customers. In fact, cloud security is the fastest and cloud-based delivery model, representing 48% of all cyber security deployments in the eCommerce industry.
What is cloud security in eCommerce?
Cloud security is a cyber-security practice that enables organizations to protect their digital assets, especially data related to customers, business operations, suppliers, clients, and more, using cloud computing platforms or through cloud service providers. The implementation of eCommerce cloud security can help business owners build a safe environment for their customers, stakeholders, and staff. Today, data is the most valuable and crucial asset for businesses and it is also the target point for cybercriminals. Thus, eCommerce brands should adopt cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing to protect their sensitive information from hackers.
Cloud security implementation focusses on cloud-based data storage that allows enterprises to save their data remotely, on the cloud, so that it is not vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Cloud computing or cloud hosting enables businesses to protect their data from threats such as DDoS attacks, unauthorized access attacks, malware attacks, payment frauds, and identity thefts.
How to implement eCommerce cloud security?
The eCommerce industry heavily relies on data to offer personalized products and services to its customers. For example, Salesforce Einstein, the first comprehensive AI tool for CRM, enables retailers to offer one-on-one shopping experiences across multiple platforms and personalized product recommendations to their customers. Besides the customer information, enterprises have to handle tedious amounts of resources such as inventory status, financial records, supply chain details, and client particulars. Cloud security, thus, becomes critical as data holds a differentiating power for an organization and can directly impact its reputation and revenue if not managed carefully.
For strengthening eCommerce security using cloud services, businesses should have a clear understanding of the different types of cloud platforms.
#1: Public clouds
The public cloud environment, managed by third-parties, serves multiple users by providing them with their own isolated spaces. Multiple tenants use cloud services over the internet via web browsers based on either a pay-as-you-use billing model or for free. A few examples of public cloud providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
#2: Private clouds
Private clouds are owned by an organization and dedicated to a specific group of users. Private cloud environments are isolated and hence more secure than public clouds. However, scalability and handling peak-loads becomes a challenge as the business grows when using a private cloud environment.
#3: Hybrid clouds
Hybrid clouds provide enhanced eCommerce security as they use the best of both worlds – public and private clouds. In short, hybrid cloud environments provide the scalability as that of a public cloud while incorporating the heterogeneity of private clouds. These are usually connected via LAN, WAN, VPNs, and APIs.
#4: Multi clouds
The multi-cloud strategy focuses on using the cloud services provided by more than one cloud provider. This approach might have a combination of private and public clouds or can utilize only private or only public clouds. Deploying multiple clouds reduces the risk of downtime and data loss while increasing the computing power and data storage capacity.
Following tips can help enterprises achieve cloud security implementation in eCommerce:
- Choose a cloud service provider that works in compliance with PCI guidelines.
- Prioritize the data that needs to be stored on the cloud and define the rules for accessing that data.
- Use SSL certified websites and data encryption algorithms to secure transactional data of the customers and suppliers.
- Setup network scans and notification alerts to avert any data breach and DDoS attacks.
- Deploy eCommerce security framework that can help companies decide the access privileges to specific users.
- Implement cloud identity management to authenticate users to login to cloud servers and implement cloud access management to allow only authorized users to access sensitive information stored on the clouds.
- Plan security audits in advance, monitor all the data and resources stored on the cloud, and automate policy enforcement.
Benefits of eCommerce cloud security
Top 5 cloud security benefits for eCommerce are:
#1: Increased ROI
Cloud security helps businesses scale during peak traffic times and handle load efficiently. Enterprises can provide seamless products and services to customers with eCommerce cloud security and register significant growth in their sales and revenue almost instantaneously.
#2: Improved business continuity
Cloud computing enables businesses to operate smoothly by speeding up their supply chain processes, managing congestion spikes, ensuring secure and fast transactions, increasing business agility, providing better disaster recovery management, helping them stay competitive, and reinforcing marketing campaigns.
#3: Reduced administrative costs
The eCommerce cloud security minimizes the use of dedicated hardware for storing data, thus reducing the expenses related to on-site data storage and management. Additionally, the security configurations and infrastructure management is carried out by cloud service providers, thus lowering the operational and administrative costs for business owners.
#4: Centralized data protection
Clouds enable eCommerce websites to mitigate the risk of DDoS attacks that can affect customer satisfaction and business performance. Businesses can store their critical data on cloud servers, as eCommerce cloud security is advanced and relies on centralized infrastructure and data storage.
#5: Enhanced speed
Companies can securely and easily access their data stored on the cloud using the internet. The immediate availability of data and applications to authorized users helps merchants speed up the online shopping experience of their customers, improve website performance, and help them scale their business to new heights.
Achieve enhanced eCommerce cloud security with disruptive technologies
Cloud security offers businesses a robust cloud architecture, excellent backup functionality, online data access, reduced financial risks, and freedom from hardware failures. It strengthens data security and cloud technology in eCommerce enables data leakage prevention, authorized data access using MFA (Multi Factor Authentication), data encryption, unified user activity logs and a friction-free experience for customers and employees.
