With the busiest online shopping event of the year this month, businesses will encounter many network challenges on Cyber Monday (News - Alert) and throughout the holiday season that are sure to test both the capacity and security of their websites. To deliver the highest quality of experience (QoE), retailers need to be cognizant of threats and be prepared ahead of time with additional load balancing and security measures in order to counter potential risks.
According to the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Shop.org, 96.5 million Americans shopped online during Cyber Monday 2009. NRF also reported the 2010 holiday shopping season will see 45 percent of young adults (ages 18-24) using smartphones to research or make holiday purchases. Such a peak in online customer demand requires detailed preparations by the IT organization to maintain a high level quality of service offered throughout the rest of the year. IT resources, both human and computing resources, should correctly shift to serve this large demand. These statistics further represent unique opportunities for hackers to target the growing number of mobile device users and leverage new financial crimeware tools to unleash malicious botnet attacks on e-commerce websites. Similar to the July 2009 cyber attacks that devastated various sites in the U.S. and South Korea, these types of assaults on Cyber Monday could result in significant network downtime and revenue loss that businesses cannot afford.
To ensure network uptime and performance while keeping assets and customer information secure, Radware (News - Alert) recommends businesses leverage the following tools:
Multi-layered Security Approaches: To ensure that mission-critical applications perform under any circumstance, it’s necessary for e-retailers to deploy a multi-layered security offering that provides complete network security. This approach helps safeguard the network with the use of an Intrusion (News - Alert) Prevention System (IPS), Denial-of-Service (DoS) protection and Network Behavioral Analysis (NBA). An advanced Web application firewall should be included to secure Web applications and enable compliance with the Payment Card Industry’s (PCI (News - Alert)) Data Security Standard (DSS). A complete network security solution should also include reputation engines that offer real-time anti-Trojan and anti-Phishing services to fight against financial fraud, information theft and malware spread. The full result is real-time attack prevention that defends the network against known, emerging and zero-minute threats.
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC (News - Alert)) with Acceleration and Performance Features: ADCs must be able to intelligently redirect the “clean” traffic to designated servers and spread traffic load throughout the data center application or Web server while addressing network capacity growth. It should also offer SSL offloading, TCP multiplexing, TCP optimization, caching, compression and more to double the capacity of each server, reduce response time and deliver better QoE. Optimizing the network with an ADC accelerates page download time while streamlining performance and delivery for effective service growth. This further helps reduce the risk of downtime and its associated costs.
Flexible and Scalable Automated Application Infrastructure: Having a solution that can scale performance levels dynamically to specific business needs without any downtime is especially key throughout the holiday season. It is equally vital for the deployed solution to have a degree of flexibility that allows IT managers to scale service capacity in a single data center or over multiple data centers on demand. The ADC solution should work closely within a virtualized infrastructure to guarantee elastic and flexible management of ADC resources as simply as the management of virtualized servers. It aims to identify and redirect excess traffic to be served by an available cloud resource. Additionally, cloud providers are offering simple, on-demand availability of resources that can be used for handling various types of short period data center overloads.
Monitoring and Tracking of Traffic and Operations: One of the most important features of safeguarding a network is by leveraging devices that continuously offer traffic monitoring, detection, risk assessment and attack signature creation for threat mitigation. These features aid the network in blocking cyber attacks and insider threats without stopping legitimate user traffic.
Businesses must fortify their networks with these advanced network security measures, load balancing and application delivery tools to ensure a profitable, safe online holiday shopping experience.