There is a big difference between running an eCommerce site on a small server with only a few daily orders and running a store that starts to scale. A growing eCommerce store handles thousands of transactions, multiple storefronts, a constantly growing catalog of products, and many users accessing backend systems from various locations.

When your store grows, so does the need to protect that growth. With all of the new integrations to your store, there are now more possible entry points into your systems. With more people on your team, you also need to manage countless additional access credentials.

And, with the addition of customers' data comes increased compliance obligations and the potential for much harsher consequences in the event of a breach. Your previous security approach may have been effective when you were smaller. However, as you scale up, it may be insufficient. Unfortunately, for many eCommerce teams, this happens just when they need to scale the most.

Proper cloud security is the solution to close that gap, not by adding an additional layer of complexity or friction to operations, but instead, by embedding protective controls within the infrastructure of your eCommerce store so that staff can continue to grow their business rather than spend their time extinguishing fires.

The Scale Problem Is a Security Problem

During eCommerce scaling discussions, the main focus is typically on the eCommerce business's performance: faster load times, more uptime, and scalable infrastructure that can handle peak season spikes without crippling eCommerce businesses. This is important merchandise. However, as eCommerce scales, security complexity increases significantly, often overlooked until a security incident occurs.

When eCommerce businesses grow and develop, many changes occur. You are now connecting to third-party payment processors, using shipping APIs, managing your eCommerce inventory via eCommerce inventory management systems, and using eCommerce marketing tools such as CRM and email tools. Each eCommerce integration creates a new data flow that you must protect.

In addition, many more people are now working in your eCommerce business; you are hiring more warehouse and shipping staff, eCommerce marketing managers, eCommerce customer service representatives, and eCommerce software developers, and each of these new roles requires eCommerce access at different levels in your eCommerce system. As your eCommerce customer database grows, you need to comply with regulations such as GDPR and PCI DSS. In addition, your eCommerce store is now subject to an increasing number of automated attack tools looking for vulnerabilities, exposed login credentials, and misconfigured cloud resources.

Cloud infrastructure is well-suited to eCommerce performance scaling, and eCommerce security is highly effective at addressing the risks associated with eCommerce scaling. Growing eCommerce businesses that treat these two areas as separate issues frequently encounter problems.

What Cloud Security Actually Covers for eCommerce

Cloud security is not limited to a single key element. Rather, it is an assortment of tools and procedures that can be grouped together to prevent loss of your infrastructure, data, customers, and team members' ability to connect to your cloud platform. For eCommerce, the most important aspects of cloud security include:

1. Data protection and encryption

Your consumers' sensitive information, including payment information, order history, account credentials, and PII, must be stored securely in the cloud. Cloud security encrypts all PII and other potentially sensitive documents while they are in transit and at rest, limits access to these documents to only those who need them, and provides methods for storing documents in accordance with any regulations that may affect your industry.

2. Access control and identity management

As your business grows, tracking individuals in your company who have access to your cloud-based environment becomes a much larger commitment to cloud security. By utilizing cloud-based IdAM tools, you can ensure that employees and any other services are granted only the resources they need to do their job based on least privileged principles, meaning that if you do encounter an instance in which an IdAM credential is compromised, your business will be much less at risk.

3. Threat detection and monitoring

Cloud security solutions are built to continuously monitor your cloud environment for intrusions, i.e., suspicious activity such as unusual API calls, access to locations outside your normal locations, and configuration changes outside your security standards. It is vital that your eCommerce team has real-time visibility into these activities to detect potential intrusions earlier than waiting for a customer to complain about an incident.

4. Assisting in meeting compliance and audit needs

Since eCommerce sites using credit card processing are required to be PCI DSS compliant, Cloud Security helps maintain your cloud's compliance by ensuring access controls and configuration standards are met, while also creating an audit trail for your eCommerce site to provide to your auditors, thereby limiting the amount of manually created documentation.

AI-Powered Features and the Security Considerations That Come With Them

AI is becoming more common on eCommerce platforms, enabling everything from product recommendations and dynamic pricing to personalized site search to fraud detection to customer service automation. The capabilities associated with AI can drive measurable success, leading the eCommerce industry to adopt AI at an accelerated pace.

However, the security implications of AI features used on eCommerce sites create opportunities that traditional infrastructure control mechanisms aren’t designed to address. An AI model can provide personalized outputs to its consumers by analyzing consumer-generated data.

Similarly, recommendation engines use browsing history, purchase history, and preference signals to provide a tailored product assortment to each consumer. Fraud detection systems use transaction behavior patterns to monitor activity across all your consumers. All three of these data drives need to be governed through the same level of rigor as any other data that flows through your infrastructure.

As such, the enterprise AI security framework is designed specifically for this purpose, governing how AI workloads are deployed in a cloud environment. The framework also outlines how data flows into and out of AI systems and how those data flows will be classified and controlled. Furthermore, the framework outlines how access to AI infrastructure will be governed to prevent ungoverned use that could expose your organization to compliance or privacy issues.

Thus, as eCommerce organizations begin delivering AI features at scale, becoming familiar with these enterprise AI security frameworks will be an increasingly relevant competency; not just as an impediment to adopting AI, but as the structure that allows for the adoption of AI in a manner that will allow for the confidence to adopt AI technologies without creating gaps in compliance or security that later arise due to an incident.

5 Practical Steps for eCommerce Teams

Having a security engineering (SE) team dedicated to taking cloud service security seriously is not essential. Here are some practical starting points for any eCommerce team that is at the beginning or in the middle stages of scaling:

1. Check who has access to what

Start with your admin panel and also evaluate your cloud hosting environment. Document which team members currently have access, at what level of permission, and whether that access authority continues to make sense. Outdated users, unused service accounts, and unnecessarily high permission levels are common security risks that are easy to remediate as eCommerce businesses grow.

2. Activate logging and monitoring capability

Many public cloud providers have built-in logging capabilities that allow users to log events related to access/usage of their cloud environment, as well as changes to the configuration of the associated cloud services they use (e.g., API activity). Enabling and conducting periodic reviews of these logs will provide insight into what is happening in your environment and help you detect anomalies in your day-to-day cloud usage before they turn into incidents.

3. Separate development, staging, and production environments

All Development, Staging, and Production environments must be genuinely separated from one another if your team uses more than one of them. An incorrectly configured development environment should not affect production data. When designing the infrastructure for a rapidly growing eCommerce business, many organizations are adopting an iterative design approach rather than a pre-planned one.

4. Manage your external integrations frequently

All third-party plug-ins, APIs, and connected services are potential security vectors and should therefore be reviewed regularly. Any service that your organization no longer actively uses should be removed from your environment. Active third-party integrations and plug-ins should be from trusted sources, and the permissions granted to them during initial setup should be reviewed to ensure they are appropriate.

5. Encrypt all customer data  

Customer data should be encrypted both at rest and in transit at all times as a standard of customer data protection. If your cloud hosting environment does not automatically enforce this type of encryption or make it a visible part of the cloud service offering, implementing it as a priority task before your organization continues to grow should be pursued as soon as possible.

Scaling with Confidence

Successful eCommerce stores do not escape security challenges; they have made security a core part of their architecture, helping them adapt to changing needs.

Cloud security provides companies with this security foundation. It protects user information, helps businesses meet legal obligations, limits losses if authorization is compromised, and enables organizations to detect and respond to threats quickly. As your business grows (more products, more customers, more add-ons, and more employees), the value of your security base increases as well.

Now is the time to build your security foundation, before you have any major issues! By acting before your company is too big or you have developed bad habits, it will be much easier to establish good habits and build good security practices.

With OpenCart, you have a platform to build a successful eCommerce store. Cloud security gives you peace of mind as you grow your eCommerce store.