The Three Leading Practices for Retail Security and Compliance in the Cloud

Cloud architecture offers retailers security and compliance via a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, where the third-party cloud vendor provides users with access to industry leading applications—freeing them from software licensing, updating, and costly manpower-intensive on-premise systems.

The identification of strategic SaaS security solutions is one of the key parts of any cloud implementation. A secure and compliant cloud will include these three leading practices that ensure retailers run secure and compliant in the cloud:

Control Customer & Employee Access to Data

As access to data for customers and employees is moved out of the organization and into the cloud, strong identity management through authentication, authorization, and access control—often referred to as identity and access management (IAM)—is where organizations must meet the growing cybersecurity threat. Benefits of this in the cloud include:

• Scalability and computational power

• Hybrid architecture approaches for separating out IAM services

• Simplified deployments due to limited customization options

• Reduced development complexities

• Eliminated platform maintenance, upgrades, and migrations

• Reduced total cost of ownership comparing subscription fees to hardware/software capital outlays

• Enhanced Customer IAM (CIAM), privacy (GDPR) and the customer experience

Analyze Contextual Data to Uncover Threat Vectors

By leveraging the full potential of security data in the cloud, organizations can protect their transactional data by centralizing visibility across an enterprise to enable quick threat detection and resolution. Benefits of security and threat analytics in the cloud are:

• Better, faster decision making with scalability and computational power

• Elimination of platform maintenance, upgrades, and migrations

• Reduced total cost of ownership comparing subscription fees to H/S capital outlays

• Open-source technologies for storage, processing, and reporting

• Embedded analytics that promotes application context with access to transactional data

• Enriched data for optimal insights

Measure Risk for Third Parties in a Constructive Way

Risk management is a vital operational function for organizations, especially those with exposure to third-party suppliers. Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) in the cloud improves visibility into third-party actions so companies can better determine how to accept and control risk. Benefits of GRC in the cloud include:

• Scalability and computational power

• Automation of third-party risk management

• Consolidation, multitenancy, and shared asset repositories