E-commerce Security: How to Control User Access to Your Environment
Whereas security in brick-and-mortar stores is essential, it’s even more important in e-Commerce. Customers who lose assurance in their security could potentially stop buying. This is why IT security should be a fundamental design principle in every company.
User authentication and authorisation of roles are another vital component of e-Commerce security. With various levels of servers and users, a centralized way of managing user access is ideal.
Many IT security breaches occur because of sloppy, or malicious behaviour. It can be difficult to guard against an insider physically taking for example customer information, but e-Commerce operations can take precautions to ensure their customer data is well protected. Process governance, audit trails and restricting employees’ use of external data storage all reduce risk. In e-Commerce environments it is essential to restrict the commands that users can run and record exactly which actions have been performed.
Remember that security breaches are a real threat to e-Commerce businesses, leaving them at risk for fines and other related damages to their reputation. IT security should be implemented and designed to minimize risk by strictly controlling user access.
Organisations should also have a Standard Operating Environment (SOE) with a Management Platform designed and configured to include ‘security by default’.
Another way to maintain good security is to use strong SSL authentication for Web and data protection. It can be a leap of faith for customers to trust that your e-commerce site is safe, particularly when Web-based attacks increased 30 percent last year. Nonetheless, it’s important to use SSL certificates to authenticate the identity of your business and encrypt the data in transit. SSL certificates are also a must for transactions. To validate credit cards we use a payment gateway that uses live address verification services right on our checkout. This prevents fraudulent purchases by comparing the address entered online to the address they have on file with their credit card company.
