August 2022 – Xorlogics

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Digitization: B2B is more complicated then B2C

The way that businesses and their customers communicate with one another is significantly being impacted by digitization. Despite realizing the promise of digitalization for their business models, B2B enterprises are still far from completely exploiting it. Companies have to adapt, strategize, and transform if they want to continue doing business.

Giving business clients access to an online store is no longer the only aspect of B2B commerce. Whether it’s B2B or B2C, business digital transformation also encompasses strategy, culture, organization, business models, and go-to-market approaches. Thus, companies must also think about ways to automate and digitize operations, which are still frequently manual. The altered behavior and heightened demands of B2B buyers during the acquisition process are added to this. B2B retailers now anticipate a similar shopping experience to that of B2C customers. Research from Gartner predicts 80% of B2B sales will move to a hybrid sales model by 2025. Additionally, according to a survey conducted by McKinsey, 70 percent of B2B decision makers say they are open to making new, fully self-serve or remote purchases in excess of $50,000, and 27 percent would spend more than $500,000.

Helping Businesses get Digital

After the huge hit of Covid19, for businesses to succeed in the medium to long term and to differentiate themselves from the competition, they must have a digitization plan for e-commerce. It is insufficient to just upload and publish catalog online. Without overdoing things, businesses need to incorporate B2B commerce into their overall digital strategy. The key element is to remember in this digital process is to think big when developing processes, but start with smaller when creating components.

A large percentage of B2B enterprises now provide digital procurement choices to their corporate customers. However, these are frequently based on strict, obsolete technologies that cannot keep up with today’s online presence requirements. Bringing data from various sources, manufacturers, and partners together on a trading platform is one of the biggest barriers for B2B vendors. In order to design technology, data and process systems so that they can readily adapt to new market demands and grow with the development of new business areas and communication practices, scalable and flexible software solutions are required.

Personalized content and a customized approach, which have long been existing in the B2C market, are still not given enough consideration in the B2B market. It is frequently forgotten that B2B clients also desire a personal contact. B2B buyers frequently change their typical shopping habits from their private end-customer behavior and seek out solutions that are specifically adapted to their needs. Existing customer data has a lot of potential to customized customer experience and an excellent user-experience in the business environment if it is integrated and used wisely.

Digital commerce involving businesses can be much more complicated and chaotic than digital trade between consumers since it calls for digital ecosystems that can quickly adjust to changing needs. Solutions enabling autonomous and highly scalable commerce enable quick and smooth migration from legacy systems. Because frontend and backend are separate, new features and products may be added without disrupting existing customers’ experiences, and system development can be provided with little to no downtime.

Businesses that adopt digital transformation will be able to take advantage of numerous benefits. With the proper implementation and good use of digital tools they can develop not only new revenue streams, but also reposition themselves, and strengthen their brands, they can establish themselves as market leaders. Compared to B2C, the digital transformation in B2B represents a much more radical change. It’s also clear that, despite being a relatively new process, B2B digital transformation is already having an effect. Even so, many B2B industries are behind and are therefore at a high risk of being disrupted.

Corporate Passwordless Authentication: Issues to address before getting onboard

22 August 2022
by: Aisha Javed
in: BlogPost
Tags: #DATASECURITY, #passwordmanagement, #passwordpolicy, #securitybreach #cybercrime2022 #hacking #threatresistanceunit #armoursecurity #homeoffice, #SecurityTrends
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With remote work, security breaches are gaining increased attraction, with passwords being the root of the problem, leading to massive financial damage and a loss of image for the companies concerned. According to the Verizon 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, credentials are the primary means by which a bad actor hacks into an organization, with 61 percent of breaches attributed to leveraged credentials. passwords with privileged access to organizational systems and networks are targets for hackers since they’re able to get so much information from just one singular source.

Corporate Passwordless Authentication Issues to address before getting onboard

These numbers make you sit up and take notice and are one of the reasons why many companies are currently looking into the advantages of a secure passwordless Authentication future. Secure logins without a password not only bring companies cost savings and smoother user logins. They also provide security as millions of employees continue to work remotely, even after the pandemic has passed.

One company or another may have already planned its passwordless strategy and are now ready to implement it. As many companies know, going password-free is more of a journey than a destination. In any case, what companies can do is make sure they don’t hit any deep potholes so that this journey runs as smoothly as possible.

The journey towards a passwordless strategy is different for every company. For example, organizations could implement a passwordless smart card approach, a passwordless FIDO2/WebAuthn approach, or even a hybrid approach that combines both approaches to meet diverse business needs. But no matter which path companies take, there are some common pitfalls that can be avoided if they are known.

When it comes to implementations, a passwordless solution can involve multiple products installed at various times for different user levels. The journey towards passa wordless future isn’t always swift. Some obstacles may appear along the way. So, companies can’t necessarily see the entire route, but they can be prepared for whatever awaits them beyond the potential obstacle. Specifically, companies should start embarking with the most sensitive, important, and critical use cases and user groups and then gradually expand the passwordless implementation.
Passwordless is not just an IT implementation. Since it can significantly change the corporate culture and processes, every department within the company must be included. If the roadmap is narrow or created by only one department, the likelihood of it failing once it must be communicated to users, HR, and senior management increases. The key to success is taking an integrated approach and involving all key stakeholders from the start to achieve maximum user adoption. This is exactly what improves the security level of the entire company.
When technical teams lead a project, communication with users and user training are often forgotten. The communications or training team must plan live or virtual events, build positive expectations and make the innovative solutions and processes easier to understand for the rest of the employees.
IT teams must verify at the earliest stage that the planned passwordless implementation will work as expected across all key systems, use cases, and users. It’s logical to set up a test environment that demonstrates the end-to-end connectivity between the existing systems and the authentication technology for the most important users/user groups and check whether their defined success criteria can be met.

Conclusion

Since using passwords incorrectly often represents an enormous security risk, more and more companies are looking for alternatives and would like to make passwordless login the standard. It is important to know that this change cannot and should not happen overnight – it is also important to choose a holistic, well-founded path, because only then does the change really bring the maximum IT security. If companies are aware of some common switching pitfalls and consciously avoid them, they will be well on their way to a future without passwords.

Source : 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report

Backup as-a-Service: Ultimate solution of Data security for the cloud Era

In the past two years, the corona pandemic has forced many companies to adapt remote work. Since then, a significant number of employees have been working from home. IDC predicts that by 2023, 60 percent of all enterprise data will be generated by remote workers. At the same time, the threat situation in terms of cyber security has intensified. Ransomware attacks increased by 80 percent between February 2021 and March 2022. While cybersecurity has long been a critical concern, it is now more important than ever for organizations to take effective security measures.

In order to access all office resources from home, employees have changed or modified firewalls and access points. As a result, since most of the data is generated outside of the corporate firewall, it creates a greater exposure. The number of ransomware attacks on software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications have also increased. And while these services generally have security features, cybercriminals can gain access through a user’s compromised operating system. Giving the possibility to the attackers to attack the cloud services themselves.

Companies must equally consider the three pillars of data security: confidentiality, integrity and availability. But how can you protect your organization and still enable the staff to exchange information safely? Confidentiality ensures that information is only accessible to authorized persons. Integrity ensures that information remains unchanged throughout its life cycle. Availability makes sure that information is accessible within a certain period of time. Together with the concept of traceability, these aspects are the basic criteria for information security.

Security is not a singular activity, it is an ongoing process and it is crucial for companies to be aware of this fact. Cybersecurity success for organizations that are proactive and only take basic security measures to protect their data has typically had limited success. IT environments must be routinely monitored so that anomalies can be identified quickly and appropriate countermeasures can be initiated in the event of an actual attack. All companies and institutions should also have the capability and services to be prepared for recovery in the event of data loss due to a ransomware attack.

However, for many organizations, their current backup solutions are either not up to date, either ineffective or costly. Most of the time their data is stores on-premises on a local server, making the storage often too slow and requiring a lot of maintenance along with carrying the risk of data loss.

Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) is a modern alternative to this traditional backup approach. BaaS, also known as online backup or cloud backup, is a way to store data remotely in the cloud and outsource the management of data infrastructure and services assistance to a service provider. A BaaS solution eliminates the traditional storage methods as it runs on cloud-based storage. Using Backup as a Service enables organizations to eliminate capacity overprovisioning and long CapEx (capital expenditure) purchase cycles and move to subscription based OpEx (operating expenditure) pricing. Equally significantly, it allows organizations to free up resources dedicated to infrastructure management to focus on more strategic tasks. This makes BaaS the ideal solution for companies that have limited or no IT infrastructure of their own.

BaaS can connect systems to a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment, depending on the organization’s existing backup strategy. The data is then managed exclusively by the external provider. Companies that use BaaS solutions only pay for the services of an external company.

The main advantage of BaaS compared to traditional (on-premises) data protection solutions is its ease of administration. By storing the data in a cloud backup solution, there is no need to manually move the data to external locations and regularly swap out the hardware, such as hard drives. Thus, it eliminates the need for physical components of data protection, such as tape drives, servers and other hardware elements. These are expensive, high-maintenance and only have a limited lifespan. The shift to opex takes the headache out of capital expenditures and upgrades with simple subscription-based pricing. As a result, a company can save significant resources and have more time to focus on business processes and its core business and thus on generating profits.

The respective cloud provider is responsible for maintaining the cloud infrastructure. Data stored in the cloud does not have to be transported either. As a result, organizations save on storage media, transporting that media to remote locations for safekeeping, and the costs associated with managing backup systems. For this reason, BaaS is also much more cost-effective.

The multi-level redundancy of a BaaS solution also offers companies a higher level of security when restoring data. This is because BaaS stores multiple copies of data in independent locations. If data is lost or deleted, the backups are easy to find and the information can be quickly restored, allowing the business to get back to business as usual in no time.

Another benefit is that certain BaaS providers offer what is known as data compliance service to comply with government regulations. These include the right to erasure and the ability to remove data along with the full content index. This feature further includes a range of ransomware protection features and provides complementary processes and services to enable users to secure data from any cloud environment.

Cloud-based backup solutions require less maintenance and are more cost-efficient, as well as more secure and reliable, and are therefore clearly the better alternative. As a result, investing in on-premises backup is no longer advisable for most businesses. Rather, they should focus on BaaS solutions in order to increase their level of protection and quickly regain access to their data in the event of a ransomware attack.

Best practices to avoid Cloud Migration hidden & indirect Costs

Cloud computing has transformed the way companies around the world do business in ways that many people don’t even realize. Cloud and cloud computing are long-running and the demand for infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service is booming. Nevertheless, multiple reports show the pitfalls of cloud migrations from entire infrastructures or application landscapes. In multiple cases, a cloud migration from planning to go-live can take up to two years. The pitfalls of cloud computing lie in subtle elements such as different billing modalities of cloud providers and technical defaults in their own IT infrastructures. These elements can quickly destroy cost advantages unless IT specialists within the company do their homework and guard themselves against evil surprises.

From the experience that Xorlogics has gained in its projects regarding cloud migration, five essential recommendations emerge that are decisive for the success or failure of cloud migration.

There’s a common misconception among IT managers in small and medium-sized businesses that the public cloud inevitably cuts costs and generates the best returns. All investment decisions should be fundamentally based on facts, instead of relying upon one’s gut feeling. The actual costs of public versus hosted private cloud must be studied in detail. Most companies and private IT users now rely on the ubiquitous cloud – both at home and at work. The pros and cons of the cloud are well known. But the hidden costs can sometimes become very painful. It’s particularly important for decision-makers in companies to carefully check the front end to avoid unpleasant surprises later.

When it comes to the in-depth planning of when and which workloads should be migrated to the cloud, the existing managed contractual obligations that are connected to the existing data center are overlooked. This begins with rental contracts and ongoing depreciation of the hardware as well as their maintenance and support contracts. It is therefore important to use the terms to clarify the total costs of such on-premises contracts in advance, which accumulate in parallel to cloud operation. This enables a realistic cost-benefit calculation of the migration to the cloud and eases the decision of which steps and in which order the changeover should take place.

Most public cloud providers can meet all common cloud requirements from a single source. The costs and services vary, however, and relying on a single cloud provider can be very risky. Instead of relying on one provider, a multi-cloud environment is beneficial for the long term. According to a study by Accenture, out of enterprises that have already moved to the cloud, 93% have adopted a multi-cloud environment that promises data security for companies by encoding data with specific techniques and distributing it across different clouds for greater protection against hacker attacks and data loss. Companies – willingly or not- are confronted with the requirements to adopt multi-cloud management. Those who are technically and organizationally prepared with appropriate solutions, experts and processes avoid cost traps – for example through workload analyses for better forecasts, rightsizing and the optimization of costs, the active use of the elasticity of cloud capacities for load peaks, or through monitoring unused services or anomalies in consumption identified.

Alignment of IT resources with their cost can determine the profitability and allocation of cost per department or user. When estimating costs and planning budgets for cloud services, it is essential to understand how individual cloud providers measure the use of their resources and which criteria are used for billing – this ranges from hourly billing for the use of individual instances to costs based on data volume and outgoing data traffic in gigabytes per month, with different commitments. This means that companies should study in detail which cloud capacities, in which qualities, and over which periods of time, the various phases of cloud migration, must be planned.

Of the many possible expensive changes for cloud migrations, two should be particularly highlighted, which can be avoided in advance by careful examination. The first one is the popular “lift & shift” approach, in which applications and data are transferred to the cloud quickly, without any adjustments. A cheap way that can lead to an unexpected cost explosion, such as the costs of the public cloud infrastructure & architecture adjustments for the cloud, followed by the considerable project planning effort. Another cost factor can arise from old systems or legacy systems, which for technical reasons cannot simply be migrated, but which must be kept with their data – mostly for legal reasons. The result: On-premises resources cannot be switched off to the planned extent and continue to burden IT budgets.

Understanding the difference between several types of cloud computing and identifying which one is the right fit for a growing business is tremendously important. The implementation of cloud strategies is associated with a complex interplay between consumption and costs, which is characterized by various technical and economic variables that change dynamically. Therefore, the IT and financial teams must work together to monitor all processes and systems that should be implemented at the same time as cloud migration. Some companies may not be used to this at first, but it helps sustainably to realize the optimal economic added value from cloud initiatives.

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