Written by: Adrian Taylor, A10 Networks

Ecommerce continues to be one of the most fast-paced and competitive global industries, with industry-watchers estimating that online sales will constitute a fifth of all retail sales worldwide by the end of 2022. As vendors strive to capture their share of market growth, they need to offer exceptional customer experiences that build loyalty and repeat revenue. However, delivering omnichannel excellence puts considerable pressure on infrastructure as site traffic increases and consumer expectations rise.

At the same time, the sector is heavily targeted by cybercriminals seeking to disrupt, extort and damage online retail businesses. Consequently, striking a balance between operational efficiency, cost control, security, and customer satisfaction is a complex challenge.

Adrian Taylor, VP of EMEA at A10 Networks

To resolve the tension between availability, performance, efficiency, and security, most e-commerce providers are accelerating their cloud transition programs with many opting for a multi-cloud strategy. These decisions are driven by the changing landscape in which they are operating and the nature and intensity of the cyber threats they face.

Security concerns: Brand and reputation are crown jewels for e-commerce companies

Ecommerce providers are acutely aware that trust is intrinsic to building customer loyalty. Anything that damages reputations and threatens customer confidence has a long-term impact on revenues. It’s not surprising, therefore, that cyber defacement and brand damage are top concerns for 62% and 49% of the businesses surveyed respectively. Linked to this is concern over user data theft and credit card theft, identified as a top concern by 52% and 36% of respondents.

Away from direct public-facing threats, more than one-third of companies cited DDoS attacks as a key concern. This is not surprising, given the increase in DDoS attacks and the potential loss of revenue. The report indicated that some e-commerce providers are struggling to resolve this issue, with one in ten reporting that they had lost availability due to a DDoS attack. Given that this directly affects revenue generation, and creates a poor customer experience, organizations should focus on ensuring that their DDoS mitigation strategy and tools are effective.

Performance pitfalls: high traffic and security trade-offs are impacting uptime

On the performance side of the equation, 86% of the e-commerce businesses we surveyed reported a significant increase in traffic. This is undoubtedly a result of the pivot to online purchasing made by millions during the pandemic, but in an industry well-used to handling seasonal spikes it was surprising that businesses reported downtime caused by traffic spikes as a top issue in the past year. This is potentially related to the heavier performance demands from new technology standards, such as the encryption required by Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS).

Priorities have changed in a multi-cloud environment

Managing performance and mitigating security threats have a different complexion in a multi-cloud environment compared to traditional on-premises systems. Our research found that the complexity of multi-cloud IT has reshaped the priorities of IT leaders.

While traditional e-commerce priorities such as disaster recovery and the ability to scale to meet seasonal demand remain important, they have dropped down the list as the resource-intensive nature of multi-cloud management becomes apparent.

Consequently, e-commerce IT leaders are seeking solutions that provide control and visibility. 60% cited centralized management and analytics as a key requirement for successful multi-cloud adoption. Consistent application delivery and security came a close second, while 46% sought efficient automation.

Adopting a polynimbus approach

As e-commerce companies continue their journey to the cloud, there’s no doubt that focus is needed to resolve the identified challenges and ensure that they gain all the benefits of multi-cloud flexibility, without losing control and visibility over critical elements of the environment.

Here, a polynimbus approach to application delivery helps simplify management and automate operations in multi-cloud deployments. It also centralizes security policy enforcement, helping organizations answer governance and compliance demands.

The pandemic’s acceleration of cloud migration within enterprises has, at this point, been well documented. Last year’s Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report suggested that more than 90 percent of enterprises now have a multi-cloud strategy.

Even in times of great urgency as we have experienced over the last 18 months, enterprise-wide cloud transformations don’t simply happen overnight. In the rush to get their multi-cloud environments off the ground and enable remote connectivity for their workforces, many enterprises will not have suitably adapted their IT and network infrastructure to support applications in a multi-cloud connected environment. Because of this, they will likely now be facing numerous challenges around the performance of mission-critical SaaS applications, automation of cloud security services, and integration of WAN applications in the public cloud, to name just a few.

When it comes to meeting and addressing these challenges, enterprises could consider the benefits of an SD-WAN platform which, through a mixture of optimization, orchestration centralization, and automation can provide a firm foundation for enabling a successful, performant, and secure multi-cloud environment.

Ensuring User Experience Through SaaS Optimization

In a time when applications were hosted in corporate data centers, routing all application traffic from the branch to the data center made total sense. Today, however, with most applications in modern enterprises delivered through SaaS, backhauling cloud-destined traffic to the data center only serves to increase latency and impact application performance.

Recognizing this, enterprises could reduce said latency by looking towards a modern, best-of-breed Edge-based SD-WAN platform, which should offer SaaS optimization features to seamlessly and securely connect users from branch sites to SaaS applications, while simultaneously monitoring the SaaS Quality of Experience (QoE).

Key functionalities that any SD-WAN purchaser should look out for include first-packet identification, wherein applications are identified and classified on the first packet, which enables traffic to be routed dynamically to its intended destination (be that the data center, cloud provider, or cloud security). This, in turn, reduces latency and ensures security policies are adhered to. Similarly, Microsoft Office 365 API integration enables secure internet breakout to the closest Office 365 entry point, thus ensuring the best Office 365 performance available.

Intelligent Local Internet Breakout

Different classes of application require different kinds of treatment to adhere to security policies and controls. As mentioned above, first-packet identification has a part to play here, but other functionalities within leading SD-WAN platforms can bolster security without impacting application performance.

Different applications can be mapped to virtual WAN overlays, each supporting various QoS, transport, and failover characteristics. For instance, trusted business SaaS such as Office 365 can be mapped to an overlay that traffics straight to the closest SaaS instance over the internet, whilst untrusted or unknown traffic is sent to the headquarters-based firewall for closer inspection.

Speaking of firewalls, having a unified zone-based stateful firewall at the WAN Edge is essential to ensure complete, secure local internet breakout. A WAN Edge firewall can connect directly to trusted SaaS applications and IaaS from branch offices, whilst also blocking any unauthorized traffic attempting to enter the branch network from the enterprise LAN.

Network Simplification Through SD-WAN Integration

Complexity is the enemy when it comes to network management, and this is most true for particularly large, global networks with many AWS Virtual Private Clouds or Microsoft Virtual Networks (VNets). However, an Edge-based SD-WAN platform can greatly simplify the management of such large networks.

By connecting directly to public cloud providers’ global backbone networks, reducing the number of point-to-point connections, and connecting branch locations directly to regional points of presence (POPs) the complexity of the SD-WAN overlay is reduced. An SD-WAN overlay should also support branch-to-branch communication without virtual gateways at each Virtual Private Cloud.

The Emergence of SASE

The emergence of SASE has had a profound impact on SD-WAN. Just as SD-WAN is transforming the network infrastructure with uninterrupted connectivity and simplified workflows, SASE takes the logical next step by placing cloud-native security controls closer to the end-users where the data is being generated (at the network Edge) and is, therefore, most at risk.

Although SASE is not a technology on its own, as an architectural framework it offers organizations the capability to bring together security and networking functions into a single, cloud-based service model. In 2021, SD-WAN should form the foundation of a SASE solution: a cloud-programmable networking platform for orchestrating and centrally managing the network, security, and SASE components.

As part of this, any quality Edge-based SD-WAN must integrate with third-party cloud security services from best-of-breed cloud security firms. Advanced API integration within the SD-WAN platform can enable network managers to fully realize enterprise-wide automation of consistent, network-wide security policies. In this way, they can combine the advantages of an advanced Zero Trust WAN Edge on-premises, whilst also enjoying the flexibility and freedom of choice to enjoy the benefits of cloud-delivered security services from their preferred security vendor.