DDoS Detection, Mitigation, Orchestration, and Threat Intelligence
Consolidated Security & CGNAT
TLS/SSL Inspection
Web Application Firewall
Application Security & Load Balancing
Analytics & Management
CGNAT & IPv6 Migration
Between rising business volumes, evolving multi-cloud architectures, and intensifying threats such as DDoS attacks, it’s a busy time for e-commerce IT organizations. A recent survey by A10 Networks and Gatepoint Research examines the latest trends in e-commerce IT as leaders work to support digital business growth while addressing key challenges in cyber security and multi-cloud management. The results show an increasingly complex and diverse e-commerce technology landscape, as well as a growing recognition of the importance of polynimbus management to ensure consistent, secure, and cost-efficient multi-cloud operations.
Today’s e-Commerce Technology Landscape
In order to have full insight into the current state of e-commerce multi-cloud environments, A10 Networks and Gatepoint Research have conducted a survey asking senior technology decision-makers from various e-commerce industries about current challenges, strategies, and practices.
Read More About Multi-Cloud Application Delivery
As e-commerce activity soars, a full 86 percent of survey respondents reported growing network traffic—including over one-third seeing more than 20 percent growth. Although a majority of these businesses continue to use private, on-premises data centers as their primary application hosting environment, the cloud plays a key role as well, with nearly as many survey participants describing public cloud infrastructure as a key application hosting environment. This role will continue to grow, with 60 percent of respondents planning to move applications to the public cloud in the next three years—the most widely named technology initiative in the survey
Offering a flexible, scalable, and cost-efficient response to changing demand, cloud services are typically deployed by digital businesses in one or both of two ways. In a hybrid cloud approach—the application hosting strategy cited by 35 percent of survey respondents—organizations use cloud services in combination with on-premises resources to provide burst capacity on-demand as needed, or to support specific workloads or use cases. With a multi-cloud strategy, organizations use multiple cloud services from any number of vendors within the same enterprise architecture. In either case, more diverse and flexible hosting and application delivery strategies will likely remain popular in the fast-changing and unpredictable e-commerce industry.
Still, the public cloud isn’t necessarily a magic solution. More than one-fifth of respondents experienced a service outage of their public cloud infrastructure, while 11 percent experienced significant multi-cloud interconnection or failover issues. Careful vendor selection and effective management are critical in the cloud as they are on-premises.
E-commerce providers have a lot to worry about on the cyber security front. Survey respondents expressed significant concern about damage to their reputation and brand, including nearly two-thirds who cited hacking and cyber defacement as top threats—the most-named risk category in the survey. Attacks like these can lead to a loss of confidence among customers, but the loss of actual data can pose an even greater business risk. Fifty-two percent of respondents named the theft of user data as a top threat, with stolen credit card information not far behind.
Which cybercrime tactics keep e-commerce IT leaders up at night? Phishing or fake sites were named by 59 percent of respondents, as hackers try to trick unsuspecting users into compromising their own cyber security. DDoS attacks and malicious code rated highly as well, and more than a quarter of respondents feared insider attacks by their own authorized users.
Concerns like these aren’t overblown. More than a quarter of respondents reported web cyber security issues, malware, ransomware, or malicious code, and 12 percent saw traffic slowed by cyber security threat prevention or remediation. DDoS attacks remain a constant threat, impacting availability for nine percent of survey respondents—and more than one-fifth of respondents planned to implement DDoS protection measures in the coming three years.
Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments can have a transformative impact on business agility, but a more diverse application delivery infrastructure brings new challenges for IT. A majority of respondents named management complexity and cross-cloud cyber security as key headaches, while nearly as many faced issues with visibility across cloud data centers. In this light, it’s no surprise that more than 40 percent faced difficulties in managing both costs and compliance.
Help Wanted: Polynimbus Management for Multi-cloud Environments
Given the complexity of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud IT, polynimbus management capabilities have moved to the forefront. Offering a centralized point of cyber security and control, a polynimbus approach makes it simpler to ensure the consistency of policies, features, and services across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. In evaluating the relative importance of multi-cloud management capabilities, respondents ranked centralized management and analytics near the top, along with consistent application delivery and cyber security, efficient automation, and disaster recovery.
