Is Your Company Ready For Black Friday?
Black Friday is three months away. Which means it’s the perfect time to examine your e-commerce site and take stock of how you can better handle your Black Friday. Just like how you don’t want to be signing up for car insurance while you’re careening towards a collision, it’s a bad idea to put off Black Friday preparations until you’re a handful of days away from one of the biggest online shopping events of the year.
So let’s get to it. Your company’s ecomm experience relies on its security infrastructure to safeguard against attacks seeking to crash servers or expose sensitive client information, and on Black Friday those attacks are only going to multiply. Taking advantage of the intense traffic strain so many enterprises will face, sophisticated bots and bad actors use common attacks like DDoS to flood your system with junk connection requests until your overloaded servers are no longer able to keep up. In order to prevent that, you need to invest in a state of the art web application firewall to block attacks.
That’s only the beginning. Attackers are constantly changing and evolving, always looking for new ways to breach your systems and break down your defenses. The only way to repel attacks and beat them is to evolve with them, and to do that, you’re going to need a sophisticated Data Stream tool to generate actionable strategic insights based on evolving attack patterns. Lastly, the cherry on top would be finding a way to coordinate the defensive and analytical aspects of your security, so that your entire system can work in tandem with semi-autonomy, confronting threats in real time. These days there are solutions that provide that kind of remote coordination in the form of orchestration tools and configuration managers.
Taking Security to the Edge
Equipping yourself with the right tools and software is the best path to a successful, secure Black Friday this holiday season. However, there is an even more powerful and comprehensive step that you could take if you’re really ready to take your security to the next level. Move to the edge. That’s right, that mystical digital space between cloud environment and end-user is one of the safest, most secure places to house your website.
Take DDoS for example, one of the most common forms of web attacks today. DDoS attacks generally work by targeting a server with a flood of junk traffic from many sources at once, attempting to force it to crash. Against a legacy system, an attack of this nature can bring the whole thing crashing down. However, a properly fortified edge network has far greater DDoS resistance. Since there is no central request-processing server to attack, attackers must instead strike at individual edge nodes. Even if they could take down a single node, its impact on the network would be mitigated by any other node from the constellation of nodes that make up the edge network. Additionally, a good edge security system can leverage the power of intelligent algorithms to divide the attack among dozens of nodes, making it incredibly taxing to generate enough connections to crash a node. This is a prime example of working with the strengths of the edge to reach new levels of damage mitigation.
The Azion Solution
In our mission to develop premium-grade edge possibilities, security is a top priority at Azion. Our product offering builds off of the strengths of the edge environment while creating deployable, user friendly interfaces to secure your edge network immediately.
Edge Firewall
Azion Edge Firewall is a deployable firewall software, securing applications, workloads, and data at the network edge. Edge Firewall provides a full range of coverage from the network to application layer with Network Layer Protection, Web Application Firewall, and DDoS countermeasures. The software is programmable, modular, and extensible, scaling to fit the demands of your network.
Data Stream
Azion Data Stream is purpose-built to collect, transform and stream large amounts of application data and service logs in real-time from edge nodes, distributed across thousands of locations, into multiple data services. Offering crucial analytics and monitoring capabilities, Data Stream is all about transparency. It provides a serverless interface and connectors compatible with a variety of SIEMs, databases, and data services, including big data services, IoT services, storage services, queuing services, as well as standard HTTP/S. Data Stream translates the complexities of your edge network into comprehensible and actionable data insights, allowing admins to view attack information in real-time.
The Takeaway
Black Friday is on its way, presenting both dangers and opportunities. If you invest in preparing your security for this major holiday now, you’ll reap the rewards ten-fold in consumer confidence and revenue gains. One way to do that is to take your security to the edge, taking advantage of Azion’s Edge Firewall and Data Stream to anticipate and efficiently respond to zero day attacks. Give it a try now, and sit back for a stress free shopping experience this holiday season. Is your company ready for BF? Talk to one of our experts to find out how Azion can help your business generate more revenue and deliver a better customer experience.
