From the onset of restrictions, retailers around the globe have been forced to quickly adapt to the digital era that has dramatically altered the retail landscape.
In the past few years, retailers in the Middle East had to weather the storm brought by lockdowns and resulting supply chain disruptions.
The adverse circumstances, however, became a new lease of life for digital innovation that, from a convenient option, turned into a lifeline.
Nevertheless, this rapid digitalisation can wreak its own havoc on retailers’ operations, because cyberspace, while being enticing due to its seamlessness, can be extremely hostile.
A recent survey by Tanium, a cybersecurity and systems management company, has shed light on the key cybersecurity challenges retailers face and offered some solutions to overcome them.
First and foremost, retailers should be alert to the danger of cyberattacks.
Senior executives in retail, citing heightened concerns about these attacks, are namely concerned about reputational damage to their organisation, losing clients plus revenue due to downtime, financial losses from paying ransoms, diminished output and losses of intellectual property.
Secondly, avoidable incidents pose a persistent problem for retailers.
According to the majority of retailers surveyed, three big yet avoidable incidents that are extremely likely to constitute a breach are: employees accidentally clicking on phishing links, a lack of adequate software to forestall cyber attacks and improper storage of sensitive data.
The third issue is that retailers channel the bulk of their technology spending towards security.
The imminence of cyber threats, affecting multiple vectors of businesses, is deemed an obvious downside of the rushed adoption of digitalisation which is making retailers immensely vulnerable to hackers.
The survey participants listed the top five places for their new technology spending to reflect the lurking risk of cyber attacks.
Ever-growing spending on threat detections, new endpoint devices, data recovery, endpoint security and employee awareness training is symptomatic of the constant risk of attacks.
Measures retailers should take:
Computacenter CTO of Networking and Security Colin Williams and EY’s UKI Cybersecurity Lead Gavin Cartwright recently participated in a panel discussion that outlined priorities that every retail CISO should adopt to thrive in cyberspace and avert cyber threats.
Deal with customers’ data through software instead of relying on hardware.
Retailers are cultivating omnichannel for customers which grants them a single digital identity that is applicable throughout all touchpoints within the brand ecosystem. Thus, they should actively introduce a new technology stack and trade hardware for software-defined tools wherever relevant.
While retailers in the past garnered and processed customer management data on-site, now they should relocate these processes to the cloud technologies to amplify customer experience and minimise reliance on physical security.
Another solution is improving team skillsets to embrace the cloud entirely.
At the peak of lockdowns, retailers did not have access to their physical data centres. Therefore, they had no choice but to resort to cloud solutions. Eventually, plenty of retailers decided to stick to the cloud to maintain these investments even once all restrictions are lifted. However, to efficiently navigate through this innovative technology, team members must be properly retrained, especially focusing on security teams that should handle data in the cloud as well as they did through physical data centres.
