Security is Paramount for Businesses in the Information Age

The recent stories circulating in the press about the security breach across the Sony PlayStation network raises a very crucial question about how businesses in the 21^st century provide online security to protect customer data and manages user transactions through their payment services.
In a world of broad connectivity, today’s web users are connected from all sides with seamless one click eCommerce solutions, personalised emails, offers by SMS and integration with social media. With that level of information sharing and flow it is vital that businesses maintain the highest level of security. With over 77 million users’ data compromised, the possibilities for fraud are monumental. From Sony’s perspective also, it is a brand disaster in a highly competitive and technology based industry, consumers quickly make their opinions felt and vote with their feet (or fingers as it might be). This is not an isolated incident however with similar breaches being experienced in recent months by other eCommerce retailers such as Play.com as well as high street giant Marks and Spencer.

With that in mind it seems that the world of eCommerce retail needs to tackle these attacks with open communication and service to ensure customers are well informed, but more importantly however is to ensure that systems, especially payment services and gateways, are robust and secure to protect the user from transaction fraud. With the ever increasing flow of customer data security compromises of this type are likely to not go away anytime soon. Cloud based systems have certainly come under fire from industry experts, but more to blame should surely be the proponents of the systems, in this case the businesses. Establishing a security protocol for dealing with issues such as this, together with a commitment to utilising the most secure and robust payment systems and CRM services is the only protection that customers as well as brands have against the hackers.

MPP Global provide security and peace of mind through PCI-DSS Level 1 Compliance for our eCommerce Payment Gateways.