There are a lot of e-commerce stores that started during the time of pandemic and grossed a fair profit over a shorter period of time. Many others were already in the e-com market who enhanced their services by getting more online orders. We can see that the pandemic had hastened the growth of e-com, which had to happen in five years, in just a few months’ time. This also further emphasizes the criticality of bolstering retail cybersecurity.
As a result of the same, more and more data is available on the cloud now than ever before. The data is stored both on private and public cloud. As the dust settles during the post-pandemic period, the e-com store owners must examine and ensure their security measures in order to ensure that the technologies and processes they are using are cyber-secured.
With more customers of all categories and demographics now willing to buy online, it is essential to protect your business from retail security challenges. This article will examine the potential threats to cybersecurity in a retail environment and the methods to avoid the same.
Protecting customer data
By knowing consumer demand and anticipating their future needs in terms of user experience and product specifications, it is crucial to implement security measures for retail success over the long term. However, doing this effectively with an e-com store is not as easy as dealing with a brick-and-mortar store.
The key to acquiring these types of vital insights is to make better use of the data at hand. It is important to derive methods to use customer data for offering a more personalized user experience to different customers. This will help build more customer loyalty and also to increase the overall revenue and return on investment.
Consumer data is usually grouped together, even though it is not the correct approach. Retailers must consider each part of customer data separately as it has various commercial values associated with each piece of information, and the risk level for each of these is also different. Moreover, there are different sorts of data getting stored on different servers and platforms. In order to safeguard each type of data, you should know when the data is stored and how.
In the e-com era, one important impediment to retaining cybersecurity may be the complexity involved in ensuring data security. Retailers need to maintain customer demographics data to plan their marketing approaches and maintain the inventory statistics to fulfill the demand. Data access is needed for the merchants to digitalize the practices.
Personal and financial info of the customers is also being gathered and stored by the retailers to ensure an effortless shopping experience for the buyers. Using this efficiently will allow them to start from exactly where they left off seamlessly from any device as a laptop, desktop, or smartphone.
Ensuring the security of data stores
The most important step for online retailers in customer data management is to store this info effectively and put it for use. There are many providers like RemoteDBA.com offering database administration support to retailers. Cloud-based data storage plans are also much cheaper and available to all sizes of enterprises. There are many web storage services offering feature-rich data storage solutions.
All these assets effectively help to boost the data volume, which interacts across the networks. However, the hackers are increasingly focusing on the financial data of the users as credit card info. They use many automated tools like card skimmers and POS malware etc., for gaining access. There are also many methods of injecting some malicious codes to the checkout pages of e-com stores, along with tactics like self-removal to avoid detection at the first point. Hackers also use methods like steganography for hiding viruses within photos etc.
Any fraud can also jeopardize retail cybersecurity. All these start with the digital attackers gaining access through a legitimate shopper account or using some staging to create their own accounts to gain this access. They make their account and act honest for the time being. Later, the attackers try to deploy some malicious resources to execute their schemes by using reshipping scams or stolen credit card info to buy high-value items, etc.
Retail clients entrust the sellers with a lot of personal information, including credit card details. So, a retained e-com store should be committed to honoring this trust by safeguarding the user information and build loyalty. Retailers can use customer data to improve user experience and to introduce loyalty programs for business growth. On the other hand, businesses should also take the apt steps for cybersecurity protection of the same
Cyber security is crucial for online commerce as cyber-attacks can cause loss of revenue, information, and overall potential for business. If you are interested in learning more about cyber-attacks, you should look at the Cyber Security course to safeguard your data from cyber attackers. Cybercriminals employ sophisticated techniques to steal business information.
Ideal practices to safeguard the retail digital business data
Over the last several years, the retail e-com landscape has been shifting dramatically. While online commerce existed as the same even before the global pandemic, the need for stay-at-home shopping had unveiled a new era in the e-com and mobile commerce sector for both the customers and the sellers. If you are looking out for ways to enhance cybersecurity during your digital transformation phase, here are a few tips.
- Protect the data servers and control panel DBs.
- Make sure that there are mechanisms in place to defeat any boats. There is much effective bot-blocker software.
- Prevent any malicious mail contents, attachments, or web content from entering into your retail network. Seal all endpoints and also provide training to all users on how to deal with them.
- Measures like Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) may help retail enterprises better manage credit card data storage security. This is now a default standard to be followed by e-com businesses. In many US states and European Union countries, the DSS standard is now mandated by law.
In a nutshell, retail e-com sellers must be committed to ensuring the cybersecurity of all the payment systems, ERPs, supply chain, warehouse management, and POS software and network systems. Make sure all these applications connected to the enterprise ecosystem are working flawlessly in a collaborative manner.
