5 key e-commerce risks and how to solve them
Increased website traffic
The first challenge that infrastructure may face in security of online store is maintaining it in the event of a sudden spike in traffic. What if a product promotion or marketing campaign created by your team goes viral and sales jump by 1000%? Does your infrastructure provide auto-scalability to seamlessly handle traffic in such cases? A very common answer is "no."
In such a situation, it is worth talking about performance testing to be aware of the volume of traffic that can be handled by your current infrastructure. We wrote about the challenge of handling increased site traffic in one of our case studies for a client.
DDoS attack
Another serious threat to websites is a DDoS ( Distributed Denial of Service) attack, the aim of which is to disrupt and completely stop a service from functioning, or even phishing. Technically, the attacks pose a serious threat to e-commerce platforms and can effectively discourage customers who will abandon purchases from your site.
How do you protect your e-commerce from such an attack? How will your infrastructure provider ensure the operation of your store during an attack? Does it offer any security of online store? What if the attack is successful? In what time frame will the site be restored to full operation? It's worth being aware of your provider's responsibilities and response times in case of the worst-case scenarios. It's worth looking into whether Cloudflare is configured for your store. Cloudflare is a popular platform that provides security and performance solutions. With protection mechanisms against DDos attacks, it provides excellent website protection, allowing you to detect and block traffic generated by bots. It also offers a range of site protection solutions, such as blocking unsafe IP addresses, and Web Application Firewall.
The loss of all data
How will your store infrastructure behave in the event of the previously mentioned fire in the server room? In what timeframe will your provider put up new infrastructure? Do they provide security in such situations? It's worth understanding if the infrastructure supporting your store was built using the IaC, or Ifrastructure as a Code, approach. This is an approach in which it is possible to recreate identical infrastructure in a very short time.
In the context of backups, on the other hand, you should be interested in the exact procedures by which they are created. Does your store use the 3-2-1 rule? Awareness of these theoretically technical issues can save your store from many problematic situations.
Lack of CPU / RAM resources
How will your store behave when the needs for CPU or RAM resources suddenly increase? For example, as a result of running a more resource-intensive process in the administration panel? The natural behavior is to add additional resources. The question is whether someone is actively monitoring this on the infrastructure side? And if so, at what time will the additional resources be added and become fully operational. It is worthwhile to determine this at an earlier stage of undertaking cooperation with an e-commerce system provider. By estimating higher resource requirements, we are able to technically prepare our store to maintain the stability of the site and keep all processes in the company running smoothly.
Lack of storage resources
Similar questions should be asked in the context of media storage space. The problem affects almost all e-commerce platforms, especially those with a large base of product resources. What if this storage space suddenly runs out? Is it constantly monitored? How are alerts configured to notify us of the problem in a timely manner. Finally, is the service provider prepared to add resources in the shortest possible time?
The answers to these pretty simple questions, can save your store from unplanned unavailability. Even a temporary unavailability of your site can leave an unpleasant experience with customers who are reluctant to return to your site. It's worthwhile to make a good hosting plan taking into account the resources needed along with your store's growth, seasonality and other factors to anticipate the need for storage resources and prevent, in extreme cases, even a site crash.
It's worth talking to your infrastructure provider about each of the darkest scenarios to understand what risks your store is exposed to. Remember, we can adequately protect ourselves from unpleasant surprises or avoid them altogether. The solution, as always, is technology. If you care about the security of your store, and what's more, you are not sure if you have already properly prepared your e-commerce for the risks indicated above, write to us. At Monogo, we have years of experience in building and maintaining secure online platforms, and with our in-house Monogo Cloud technology, we can guarantee the highest level of security for your site.