7 out of 10 Indian companies (78%) experienced a ransomware attack in 2022. While cybersecurity is a focus area for every industry, it is the B2B e-commerce sector that needs to be particularly wary of cyberattacks.
B2B eCommerce businesses: A soft target for cybercriminals
B2B eCommerce organisations and their customers are some of the most vulnerable groups, because:
- A point-of-sale (PoS) intrusion can give attackers quick access to the most sensitive information, such as financial and personal details.
- eCommerce businesses rely heavily on technology – such as mobile applications and chatbots – to manage operations and process transactions. These online touchpoints increase the threat surface of an organisation and can be an easy target for hackers.
- E-commerce businesses need to frequently upgrade their systems and transfer large amounts of customer data to new platforms. This increases their vulnerability to cyber threats during the transition stage, leading to data loss, financial damage, and loss of customer trust.
Five ways to amp up cybersecurity efforts for your B2B eCommerce business
To safeguard against threats, your eCommerce business requires an integrated solution that provides a comprehensive overview of your security posture, enabling you to detect and respond to threats promptly. Salesforce Platform helps you secure your enterprise with advanced, natively built tools that enable security, privacy, and compliance, all in one place.
Here are some ways in which Salesforce Platform can help you create trusted, digital environments.
1. Ensure data privacy compliance
Ensure that your e-commerce platforms adhere to region-specific data privacy laws. From India’s Information Technology Act (2000) to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), amongst others, these laws have established legal frameworks that govern how organisations can collect, process, and share personal data. While this helps protect sensitive information and ensure data privacy, it can be complex for businesses to comply with multiple regional regulations and privacy requirements.
Storing customer data in accordance with data privacy norms requires eCommerce organisations to implement appropriate security measures, obtain valid consent, and provide transparency and control to customers. And Salesforce Platform has built-in tools that allow you to control privacy management at every stage of the data lifecycle.
2. Protect sensitive data while testing, launching, or upgrading apps
An eCommerce app typically goes through several rounds of testing and reworking, during which it can be easy to overlook potential issues, defects, and bugs that compromise data security.
Did you know that you can use data masking to secure your test environment, by replacing sensitive business and B2B customer data with dummy data? By replacing data with random characters or numbers or by selecting certain critical fields to be masked or deleted, you can ensure high data security and safe testing. It is also crucial to define policies as to which types of data you consider sensitive.
An AI-enabled cybersecurity solution like Salesforce Shield can help you find and classify critical information quickly, helping you apply the right protection controls sooner.
3. Regularly purge customer records
An easy way to protect customer data against potential cyber-attacks is to clear unused or redundant customer data from the system. If there is critical data that might be relevant for long-term use, it should be sifted, anonymised, and transferred to more secure sections within your business’s digital environment.
Use Salesforce Platform’s advanced archiving and retention capabilities, to safely store data that does not serve an immediate business purpose. It can also help users easily access and manage this data for future use.
4. Add additional security to the mobile user interface
Mobile devices with limited or no anti-malware protection increase the risk of data compromise. Threats from an unsecured device include phishing attacks and unauthorised account access to your eCommerce site. In such a scenario, passwords do not provide sufficient security.
It’s essential to leverage multi-factor authentication(MFA) for a more secure mobile shopping experience. Additionally, ensure data confidentiality with AES 256-bit encryption and using your own data encryption keys.
5. Run routine security compliance audits
Cyber criminals continuously change tactics and find new vulnerabilities to exploit. Regular security compliance checks help identify and fix potential vulnerabilities in your security settings, monitor data use, and mitigate threats.
Automated auditing features give you access to detailed information like system health status, user and usage details, an overview of roles, API usage, vulnerabilities across local and cloud systems, security configurations, and much more. An automated audit trail reduces the complexity of the process and helps you understand the state of data on any date at any time for different purposes such as regulatory compliance, internal governance, and more.
Secure your business with Salesforce Platform’s security solutions
Salesforce Platform security solutions, when supported by other Salesforce products, offer you all the tools you need to ensure enhanced data protection for your B2B eCommerce business, strengthen regulatory compliance, and improve mobile security – all on a single, trusted platform.
With Salesforce’s data security solutions, you can:
- View, analyse and manage your security data in one place
- Monitor app and critical business data use
- Encrypt sensitive data and have full ownership and management of the key material used in encryption
- Automate security policies
- Run compliance audits and create forensic data-level audit trails and much more.
