During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people turned to online shopping. They feared contracting the virus via in-store shopping. As a result, some stores closed permanently, and other stores closed temporarily during the beginning months of the pandemic. With limited stores open, eCommerce sales continued to grow by 39% in 2021.
eCommerce Growth
Similarly, eCommerce platforms have seen considerable growth. Additionally, cyber-attacks with online businesses have increased in recent years. This has caused an increase in hackers gaining access to companies’ and customers’ financial information. With more people making online purchases, it is increasingly vital that eCommerce businesses fortify their security to prevent online payment information theft. Theft of payment information can severely damage an e-commerce business’s reputation in the eyes of its customers.
eCommerce Security
A cyber threat on the rise, especially against eCommerce, is e-skimming. This type of threat involves placing malicious code on e-commerce checkout pages that collect payment information and deliver it to cybercriminals. With this growing threat, it is important that eCommerce businesses need to pay attention to vulnerabilities in their online platforms that can make them susceptible to such attacks.
When planning this type of update in security, it is useful to establish a thorough security infrastructure design document. However, it can be a bit difficult for someone not well-versed in technical jargon pertaining to IT security. For this reason, it is recommended that eCommerce businesses hire the right person, such as a technical writer, who is sufficiently knowledgeable in tech.
What is a Security Infrastructure Design Document?
The purpose of a security infrastructure design document is to document the information to outline the effective architecture and system design that acts as a guide for the security architecture of an IT platform. This documentation defines security measures to be taken to protect an IT infrastructure. This document guides with protecting customer data, ensuring that unauthorized individuals do not gain access to data, following security strategies that help identify potential threats and vulnerabilities of a security system, and so on. The essentials a site should have in mind and that should be included in a security infrastructure design document are:
- Firewall protection
- Secure configurations
- Make sure only authorized personnel have access to information
- Authentication system
- Detection and prevention of attackers
- Offline data backups
Understandably, these concepts can be pretty confusing to a non-specialist. Thus, it is necessary to have the right person create a business’s security infrastructure design document. A well-informed technical writer can be of the utmost use in writing documentation. This is vital to ensuring the security of one’s site and business.
Security Infrastructure Documentation for eCommerce
As mentioned earlier, eCommerce businesses have faced increased cyber attacks as online shopping has and will continue to trend. Therefore, your security infrastructure design document must describe how your business can prevent external threats from affecting your eCommerce business. For example, to protect against the growing e-threats, eCommerce businesses implement specific strategies outlined in the security infrastructure design document.
For instance, the system can run regular scans to detect foreign or malicious codes. This strategy can help prevent the intrusion of attackers attempting to insert their code into an eCommerce site to steal customer information. However, this is not the only strategy an eCommerce business should use, but only one of the numerous others, such as running simulated cyber attacks to check for blind spots and having an incident response ready in case of a data breach.
How EDC Can Help
Given the increase in cyber attacks against eCommerce sites and the growing sophistication of these attacks, eCommerce businesses need to update and monitor their security continually. For this reason, it is critical to have a thorough security infrastructure design document to ensure that a site’s design includes strategies set up to protect an eCommerce business and its customers’ data. EDC’s technical writers are valuable in developing this documentation as they have the knowledge and experience to produce such complex and extensive documentation. In addition, our technical writers have decades of experience producing work for medical, scientific, and financial technical industries. They have helped various types of companies including engineering companies, software companies, and pharmaceutical companies.
Written by Diana Guerra