Don Boxley, CEO @DH2i on Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Don Boxley, CEO, and Co-Founder of DH2i (www.dh2i.com) would like to offer the following thoughts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

 

"With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner, IT operations continuity and data security are at the very tip-top of mind. This is particularly true as business leaders are well aware that customers no longer base their loyalty on just products or services or even price. The customer experience (CX) is now the name of the game, and if you cannot meet customer demands and expectations, they will simply move on to your nearest competitor.

 

In the upcoming 2019 holiday shopping season, CX will be gauged on system availability and data security. In other words, customers will want to shop and purchase anytime from anywhere - and they will be less than thrilled if their personal data is compromised."

Photo credit: marcoverch on VisualHunt / CC BY

 

Additional fodder from Don, should you be interested:

 

"According to HubSpot, it costs a business about 5-25x more to acquire a new customer, than sell to an existing one, and existing customers spend 67% more than new customers.

 

And, one need only Google, "cost of downtime on Black Friday or Cyber Monday" to find countless articles and research talking about the millions of dollars and incalculable cost to reputation if your systems go down on either day. According to a CIODive article last year, Walmart stood to lose about $20,000 for every 30 seconds its website has downtime, Target would lose $508,608 every hour, and Macy's would lose about $664,920 per hour.

 

Next, try Googling "cost of a data breach in retail" and again, you will be presented with a plethora of information. For example, a recent RSM white paper revealed that from 2013-2017, the average breach cost for cyber claims was $1.3 million, costs related to malware and viruses cost $2.4 million and hacking cost retailers over $1.5 million.

 

Some points for IT organizations to ponder this holiday season:

 

-        High Availability (HA) Need Not Be Complex or Expensive to Ensure - What retailers really need this shopping season is "smart availability." High availability should be smart and encompass far more capability than just a solution to combat unplanned outages. HA should be an all-inclusive approach for total optimization of your environment. It should keep downtime-including planned outages-as close to zero as possible, improve, not complicate the management experience for your team, and it should never require a compromise between cost and availability.

 

-        VPNs are Neither Private nor Secure - VPNs are failing to adequately protect enterprise systems and data in today's hybrid, the heterogeneous world of multi-cloud settings. Retailers must turn to alternate solutions designed with today's IT and business environment in mind, such as software-defined perimeters (SDP). SDP achieves "zero-trust" security in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. SDP provides security through "micro-perimeters," which are micro-tunnels that allow administrators to segment by application, rather than by network. By leveraging SDP technology, retailers can deploy a secure perimeter, and protect gateways and network data transfers alike from unapproved usage, effectively shrinking their network's attack surface."