“To stay ahead of the game, e-commerce players increasingly need to rely on regular software and/or capability upgrades to enhance the user experience.”
Kavita Viswanath, GM, JFrog
E-commerce has become an inherent part of our lives – 93.5% of global internet users have purchased a product online at least once.1 As per eMarketer and Statista, online retail sales are expected to reach $6.51 trillion by 2023, with e-commerce websites accounting for 22.3% of total retail sales2. The Indian market is no different: a recent report from India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF) predicts that the Indian e-commerce market will surpass the US to become the second largest market in the world by 2034, with grocery and fashion apparel likely to be the key drivers of growth.
In recent years, with e-commerce businesses competing for an increasingly bigger piece of the total retail pie, various marketing, and promotional activities such as festive sales, Black Friday, Independence Day, and The Big Billion Days sales have become the norm. These initiatives with their hard-to-beat offers attract very heavy footfalls on e-commerce sites. According to industry sources, leading e-commerce websites in the country average 2-2.5 million orders per day and on festive sale days, they are looking at an average of 100 orders a second!
Building a winning e-commerce platform
E-commerce players today need to ensure that their platforms offer salient features such as stability & scalability; availability even during high demand; security of customer information; updates/new rollouts of features to keep up with customer behavior changes and AI-powered features that enhance customer experience through virtual trials and faster response.
To stay ahead of the game, e-commerce players increasingly need to rely on regular software and/or capability upgrades to enhance the user experience. The reason for this is clear – with large amount of data generated, mining it to understand the customer journey and glean customer insights becomes imperative to improve and personalize user experience. Building models with the use of Machine Learning and accessing references that may be on open-source libraries is quite common. If these libraries are not verified, they may provide a backdoor entry to potential hackers to gain unauthorized access to the platform as well as stored, sensitive Personal Identifiable Information (PII) of users.
To ensure all that data remains secure, e-commerce companies need to set up effective security checkpoints at the development and coding stage itself. Here’s where DevOps-centric security plays a pivotal role in building a winning e-commerce platform.
Role of DevOps-centric Security
Offering advantages such as monitoring and alerting, collaboration and communication, infrastructure automation, and much more, DevOps ensures that any software updates, feature upgrades, etc., are rolled out to the end user quickly, safely and with little to no disruptions.
The distribution feature of DevOps packages particularly allows DevOps teams to be located remotely and yet have direct access to the latest, verified libraries. Take for example, the JFrog Artifactory Edge Node. Thanks to the local hosting feature, it allows faster and timely deployment of updates. This is vis-à-vis libraries that are only hosted at a central location resulting in updates/software patches taking longer to upload due to slow internet speeds, disrupted connectivity, etc.
Additionally, pipeline solutions of DevOps offer updated integrated sources, references and open-source libraries to development teams working even remotely. The entire process is built on best practices that ensure the code is safe and secure at the infrastructure/building block level to avoid future mishaps such as hacking of the platform, data breaches and overall misuse.
DevOps-centric security solutions can help manage IT costs by reducing the instances of data security breaches from ground-up. It is found that the cost of remediating a vulnerability only goes up as it moves further into the production cycle and can go as high as $7,600. If the same is caught at the development stage, the cost can be as little as $80!3 Thus, DevOps-centric security ensures faster, a more secure, and a scalable platform critical for every online user.
Precaution is always better than cure
Security often comes as an afterthought, whereas it should be embedded in the entire process. As businesses build their e-commerce platforms and entire software supply chains, they should implement different gates of security.
As the world turns more digital, the global e-commerce market is expected to continue an upward growth trajectory. While this means more business and profits for the e-commerce players, the flipside is that it opens a Pandora’s box in terms of misuse of user and business data across the software supply chain leading to huge losses. An effective partnership between e-commerce companies and experts in the DevOps-centric security space can however help build a safe, secure, and future proof platform.
