Insecure, slow web experiences are a serious threat to your business

by Elle Poole Sidell on October 24, 2019

Today’s consumers are living solidly in the post-breach era with more than 3,800 publicly disclosed breaches in the first six months of this year alone (exposing a staggering 4.1 billion records). Over 60 percent of consumers believe companies are vulnerable to hacks and cyberattacks, and 78 percent are concerned about their apps being compromised. It probably comes as no surprise that a new differentiator is becoming an important part of purchasing decisions — security.

As organizations continue to move towards increasingly digital business models, it’s more important than ever to consider the role that trust plays in the customer experience. Delivering good web experiences goes beyond exceeding customer expectations, businesses must take serious steps to protect their customers’ privacy or risk the consequences.

Why your legacy CDN doesn’t meet the needs of your modern websiteRelated Blog

One in five users will stop using an affected app or service, or move to a competitor’s service, following a breach.The global average data breach costs a company $3.92 million (including remediation costs, fines, and lost business), but in the United States, the average is $8.19 million — the highest cost globally when compared to other regions.

Consumer expectations for good web experiences are evolving to include security

75 percent of consumers judge a company by its website, and if your site loads slowly or is confusing to navigate, customers may assume your business is hard to work with or doesn’t understand the needs of modern consumers.

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With customer acquisition costs up 50 percent in the past five years, getting visitors to stick around is essential to profitability, and that means optimizing for the device, browser, and congested last mile connections. On average:

Fewer than 3 percent of website visitors convert into buyers
39 percent of users give up on a website that takes too long to load
47 percent of people expect websites to load in two seconds or less

And while consumers expect a fast-loading, mobile-responsive site loaded with rich, dynamic content — they also want to feel safe when handing over their personal data to a company. In fact, a 2018 study by IBM Security found that over half of consumers or business users would never trade security for convenience. This is a marked difference to a 2008 Gartner study, which concluded that people were resistant to adopting additional security measures that would add more friction to logins, such as using a password manager.

But the idea of doing whatever is easiest has lost its appeal now that people fully understand the scale and risks of data breaches.

Capital One disclosed a breach earlier this year that affected 100 million people, exposing credit card applications, social security numbers, and bank account numbers.
The 2017 Equifax breach affected 143 million people, with the company estimating nearly half of the US population.
Web skimming attacks being carried out by Magecart have dominated the headlines this year — with credit card skimming scripts spotted on at least 2 million sites.

Unsurprisingly, some organizations are starting to explore cybersecurity as a means to drive customer loyalty, but at the same time, they still have to balance this with the web experience itself.

The anatomy of a Magecart attack and how Instart helpsRelated Infographic

A complete web security platform that meets all of your security and performance needs

Delivering high-performance modern web applications requires advanced caching, intelligent performance capabilities, such as smart optimization of images and code, and the ability to leverage edge services. In addition, the evolving threatscape requires businesses to be able to protect against more traditional attacks, such as SQL injection (SQLi), cross-site scripting (XSS) or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), while also keeping the door shut against newer emerging vectors, such as sophisticated bots or web skimming.

With the rise of modern browsers, devices, and new e-skimming threats like Magecart, it’s more essential than ever for companies to take steps to get control and visibility in the browser — this is where your traditional security solutions may be falling short. For example, since Magecart focuses on compromising third-party JavaScript, which is loaded in the browser at runtime, none of the attack code actually passes through your network or security controls, rendering web application firewalls and other security solutions useless since they aren’t able to detect this type of threat in the first place. Appliance and edge-focused security solutions are no longer enough — failure to evolve can lead to being compromised.

Instart is the only solution that provides a complete content delivery network (CDN), advanced web performance, and end-to-end protection of your web application and APIs. By protecting the entire traffic path of your application, from origin to the browser, Instart enables you to secure your entire application infrastructure, blocking threats and preventing data exfiltration. As cyber threats continue to grow in scope and evolve to be more sophisticated, your success will increasingly be defined by your ability to build and keep customer trust.

Learn how to deliver performance with complete end-to-end securityRequest a demo