3 steps retailers should consider during the COVID-19 crisis

As I write this blog, the COVID-19 pandemic is raging around the world and causing major disruptions in our lives. Governments are enforcing partial and full lockdowns, such as the Northern California “shelter in place” order. People are staying home and transacting online instead of visiting physical stores. We are seeing these photos in the news everyday – previously crowded shopping malls are now deserted, streets are empty, popular restaurants are shuttered.  

As a result, much of the consumer buying has quickly shifted from physical to online. To retain customers and stay in business, retailers need to quickly ramp up e-commerce applications. What steps can they take to minimize business disruptions and improve their ability to consistently serve customers? 

Step 1 – Scale up e-commerce quickly 

Fortunately, public cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, and GCP provide powerful platforms that allow retailers to quickly spin up or expand online stores. What previously took weeks or even months to implement can now be done in a matter of days. To quickly and effectively secure e-commerce applications, retailers should leverage a sophisticated and easy-to-use application security solution like Barracuda’s WAF-as-a-Service. 

Step 2 – Ensure availability 

With this COVID-19 crisis, we are all in unchartered waters. While it is clear that consumers are going online more, the traffic patterns and spikes in demand can be quite unpredictable. Just like e-commerce infrastructure itself, web application security solutions need to seamlessly accommodate traffic volume. Perhaps even more importantly, they need to have Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection, as an unmitigated DDoS attack can block all traffic and quickly bring an e-commerce business to its knees. 

Step 3 – Protect e-commerce applications and customer data 

Today, retailers need to protect against sophisticated hackers that are very skilled at breaking into online stores and web applications. In addition, we are seeing a rise of malicious human-like bots that use sophisticated techniques such as credential stuffing to quickly cause major damage. Retailers need to deploy web application security solutions that can protect against both sophisticated hackers and automated bot attacks.  

Barracuda can help – please reach out to learn more.