Holiday Shopping Readiness: How is Retail Data Security Holding Up?

Holiday Shopping Readiness: How is Retail Data Security Holding Up?
madhav
Wed, 11/06/2024 – 05:30

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The 2024 holiday season is here. Retailers have been prepping for this season all year and are ready to provide a safe, secure, and seamless customer shopping experience.

According to the National Retail Federation (NFR), retail sales during 2024 will grow between 2.5% and 3.5% from 2023 to between $5.23 trillion and $5.28 trillion. In preparation for fluctuating consumer demand and competitive pressures, retailers must continuously innovate to meet customers’ needs, provide exceptional shopping experiences, and drive customer engagement and retention.

Merchants are well aware that shoppers are becoming more intentional about their holiday spending and cautious about where they shop. Consumers are guarding their privacy more than ever. Any operational downtime or even worse data loss due to a data breach could significantly impact customer loyalty and their highly anticipated holiday season revenues.

During the holiday season, retailers experience a significant surge in transactions, both online and in-store. This flux creates a prime opportunity for cybercriminals to target sensitive customer information. Vendors’ attention is increasingly fragmented across various data-collecting and transactional platforms. As if things were not difficult enough, data collection in more states and countries is becoming stricter, with increased consumer protection laws leaving retailers applying tighter data privacy to their digital platforms.

To stay agile and maximize every sales opportunity, retailers rely on third-party cloud-managed computing environments and third-party SaaS services to enable real-time access to data, facilitate operational monitoring, and improve the efficiency of store management. Cloud technology has significantly transformed the retail industry, addressing various business needs such as reducing infrastructure costs, and managing resources. Cloud services offer security mechanisms to protect against cyber threats, however, data security challenges in the cloud remain relevant and require special attention. Retailers are very familiar with the risks and consequences of data breaches, with attacks occurring as far back as a decade ago and continuing to target retailers to this day.

According to a rece

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