The stunning success of e-commerce websites has made it a target of cyberattacks in the past years. According to TotaRetail, site owners can save their sales this season by backing up their online shops.
This advice comes in light of the increasing incidents of cybersecurity exploitation targeting e-commerce websites. Research shows that 70% of small business sites suffered from attacks during the holidays, while in 2019 so far, the number surged by a whopping 500%.
Online stores suffer greatly from such incidents as these tend to disable the shop from operating for hours or days after being put offline. In fact, such attacks have sunk some websites out of business.
The negative impact of such downtimes stems from the loss of prospective income. While the most powerful data storage platforms are employing serious and expensive measures to protect their data, small-time retailers do not have such kind of resources.
TotalRetail emphasized that such attacks do not only result in downtimes, but also in permanent loss of data. Many e-commerce websites have lost important information including individual account data, product listings, orders, customer lists, vouchers, and even blog posts.
This is why owners of these sites should implement a backup strategy to help preserve their data in the event of an attack. Owners can save their digital assets by performing manual backups by downloading comma-separated values (CSV) files, which can be restored should they lose their data. As CSV files do not include images, text context, and other similar sources, manually making copies is necessary.
Aside from manual methods, owners also have the option to use existing third-party services. These automatically create backups and store them on the cloud. Victims of attacks will be able to restore their sites through online methods.
Owners of big tech retail stores can also create their own backup solutions. However, the article noted that this requires expertise and resources, which small-time e-commerce sites might not have.
To prevent total loss of information, the article also suggests creating a routine to download files for all important data stored on the websites. Making such backups after making changes to the e-commerce website is expected to help save the site.
According to TotalRetail, these moves not only help keep data but also save resources that would be spent rebuilding the website. This can also help maintain sales during the holiday season.
