We are excited to be attending the Meet Magento 2019 NYC Conference. Here are some of the things we are seeing during the conference that you should be paying attention to for your Magento E-commerce environment.
A look at the event
Magento Mobile Optimization Discussion
How to compete on shipping in an age of Amazon
How to stay secure with your Magento environment
Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that can provide many benefits for your business, allowing you to track important data and effectively implement your growth strategies. It is used by both large and small businesses working in a vast number of industries. The Salesforce platform provides a wide array of services as a part of their enterprise cloud services, from analytics to collaboration tools, but to truly get the most out of it, you can integrate it with other cloud-based accounting systems like Sage Intacct, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Xero or Quickbooks.
Integrating your accounting software with Salesforce will help to make sure your customer service, sales, and financial teams are in sync. This will minimize issues between these different aspects of your business. Many businesses make the mistake of separating their accounting, marketing, and customer service from each other with segmented software tools. Important information gets held up in one department when it could benefit another significantly and make a positive impact on the business as a whole. That information will probably eventually get where it should go, but it could be too late for it to make any difference. Not to mention, manual entry of data between systems often leads to errors and data discrepancies.
Minimizing this “information bottleneck” will improve your business with speed and information accuracy. Salesforce integration with your accounting application will streamline this information flow. You’ll get a more cohesive view of what is actually going on in your business and make decisions based upon that clearer and more accurate view. You can use Salesforce to maximize efficiency, doing things such as automating invoice creation, syncing customer records and managing sales commissions.
This is not to say that accounting software integration with Salesforce is always an easy thing to do. There are a number of common pitfalls that you need to avoid.
As with many other aspects of business, having a clear plan about your Salesforce integration is important. It will allow you to know what result you want out of the process, what resource you are allocating towards it, and how you can mitigate the issues described above or other potential pitfalls lurking.
One of the most important ways to smooth your Salesforce and accounting software integration process is by choosing the right accounting software for your business goals. There are a number of options out there, each of them with their own features and structures. Here’s an overview of some of the best accounting software applications for Salesforce integration:
Microsoft Dynamics NAVMicrosoft Dynamics NAV provides a number of different financial services. It allows you to manage your accounting books and reports, automate your supply chain, and more. Microsoft Dynamics NAV allows you to connect financial data from accounting, sales, purchases, and inventory, as well as help to manage budgets and create sales forecasting.
Multiple Microsoft Dynamics NAV databases can be integrated with one Salesforce instance. Syncing the two not only helps with keeping customer data synchronized but can also help both platforms maintain the most updated product and inventory information.
Sage IntacctSage Intacct automates a number of vital processes and offers business owners a more effective and comprehensive view of performance. This accounting application’s stated goal is to reduce users’ reliance on spreadsheets. It covers all your core financial needs and is very highly rated among accounting applications.
By integrating Sage Intacct with Salesforce, you’ll gain a very thorough and transparent view of your customers and customer interactions. Sage Intacct has been designed with Salesforce and business application integration in mind, making it one of the smarter accounting applications to integrate. You can check and modify data housed in Sage Intacct while using Salesforce. It is an extremely effective method of streamlining your workflows.
Sage Business Cloud Financials is accounting software developed by the same company as Sage Inacct. It is focused on providing business and industry live updates on any device. It is a great solution for a business team that is frequently on the move and needs to be able to make decisions no matter where they are.
Sage Live is built on the Salesforce App Cloud, meaning it is already integrated with Salesforce. You will get the most out of Sage when using Salesforce in conjunction.
NetSuiteNetSuite is a cloud-based business ERP application that offers flexible accounting and financial management, enterprise-level business information management and real-time analytics of financial performance. Transactions can be tracked on every level. You can use NetSuite’s accounting application to manage your billing, revenue recognition, financial planning, financial reports, and much more. It’s a very flexible and comprehensive accounting and ERP suite.
Integrating your NetSuite ERP application with Salesforce will provide the CRM platform with up-to-date info on transactions, accounts, and financial reports as well as providing NetSuite with up to date information on sales pipeline metrics. The end result will be an enhanced management and business technology experience with concrete insight into business-critical information. NetSuite is an ideal platform for integration with Salesforce and it can be done with pre-built connectors.
QuickBooks Online (QBO)QuickBooks Online is one of the most commonly used and highest reviewed accounting software suites for SMB’s. You can easily use it to manage bills, track travel miles, create financial reports, pay your employees, even among contractors, and more. Some users consider the software’s frequent updates to be more of a bug than a feature since sometimes it forces users to re-learn how to do basic tasks, but it is a sign of just how much effort the company puts into keeping the software secure and up-to-date.
Intuit, the company behind Quickbooks, has seen the value of integrating QBO with Salesforce and has done what they can to make integrating the two easier for their customers. QBO is very good at what it does with accounting, but does not provide the same support as Salesforce does for customer tracking. Integrating the data maintained by QBO with Salesforce’s CRM capability enables you to make more accurate decisions about sales opportunities and the direction you want to grow your business.
XeroXero, similar to QBO, provides online accounting services for small and medium businesses, including managing customer payments, inventory, payroll, paying bills, and tracking bank reconciliation. Xero is designed to make accounting faster and easier, which it does very well. It can be used on any device through its mobile app and reports can be customized to suit your needs quite easily. The support is excellent.
Integrating Xero with Salesforce will make your business move much faster by taking advantage of Salesforce’s top-tier CRM platform and Xero’s excellent accounting capabilities. You and your team can receive accounting information on Salesforce from Xero, while transactions completed using Salesforce will be transferred to Xero and will be reflected right away on your accounting reports.
Integrating accounting applications with Salesforce improves the quality of the information accessible to your organization. It allows you to minimize “information bottlenecks” and ensure that the decision makers in your organization have a complete picture of events when they need it. There are accounting applications designed to manage a number of specialized functions, many of which can be integrated with Salesforce with the right knowledge and experience. The end result is a more efficient flow of information across business silo’s and ultimately an improved bottom line.
At Curotec, we have extensive experience integrating business applications to improve the overall effectiveness of the software. We help our clients extend Salesforce into mobile and web applications for both customers and employees.
Contact us today to see how we can help you integrate your accounting software with Salesforce or another CRM. Our experts are ready to help customize a solution with a positive impact on your company.
Business Intelligence (or BI) is a hot topic in the business world these days. Although it doesn’t gain quite the number of headlines that blockchain and the Internet of Things do, it isn’t because of a lack of importance. In fact, depending on your organization, Bi might be far more relevant, and certainly more immediately important to you.
Many businesses still aren’t clear on what business intelligence is, or how it can help them. Yet it’s more important to businesses of all sizes in 2018 than it has ever been before.
The first step in understanding why business intelligence is so important to businesses today starts by understanding what it is (and what it isn’t) and its origins.
BI is a term that’s used pretty loosely across both business and IT departments. What it’s largely understood to be, however, is the tools and technologies that help businesses make data-driven decisions. The technology that stores the data, the code that acts on the data to make it understandable, and the tools that allow the data to be viewed by technical and business audiences alike with clear graphical visualizations are all part of business intelligence.
The analysis of this data frequently falls under the term business intelligence as well. Business analytics is the processing of the data into a form that helps businesses make smart decisions. Processes like predictive, descriptive, and streaming analytics all provide views of the information that the BI tools store and make available.
Technology isn’t required for business intelligence, however, despite the term being primarily applied today to tech tools. In fact, the phrase was initially coined in 1865 by Richard Millar Devens in discussing a contemporary’s use of data to guide his banking business, profiting on customer trends before competitors could do so.
At its very core, that is what BI is. It’s using information that an organization has, or has access to, to make informed planning decisions to give them an edge on their competition.
Since computers got involved, BI has taken leaps forward, but in the early days of technology-based business intelligence, things were complicated. Systems were siloed and it took specialized skills and knowledge sets, and a lot of time, to pull meaningful insights from the information.
Technology evolved, allowing companies to store an increasing amount of data, process it faster, and make it available across more systems. Business intelligence and connecting data sources across the business was the driving force behind the creation of relational databases.
Technology has continued to change to accommodate massive amounts of data useful to companies. As the amount of data has increased, so has the ease of use of the tools.
Business intelligence has changed drastically over the past decade. Thanks to new database tools, companies can now store more data than ever before and use that data in meaningful ways.
Development tools have made it easier to create data views for analysts to correlate information across business units quickly so that decisions can be made at the speed of today’s business world. While these tools still require technical resources, the time can be spent in automating data processing instead of manually pulling data from multiple sources and developing the reports from scratch.
In addition to that, another key change in BI as we know it today is the concept of real-time data vs snapshot data. When you build a report manually, that report becomes outdated the minute you print it out and because of this fact, in order to keep relatively up to date business reports, there are a large number of continuous man hours required just to pull data and generate reports. With BI, a technical implementation team can set up the system integration, data plumbing and reporting interfaces up front and the business users can view and pull in real-time reports 24/7/365 to gain real-time insights into their organization with data that is never stale. This ability gives a company the clear advantage over the legacy competition that does not have access to real-time insights.
Data is also no longer limited to what you have been able to gather from your own company. Data streams can be purchased and integrated into company data to give a complete picture of any given area, from customer profiles and habits to manufacturing and supply chain predictions. It’s not just about measuring and then beating your own benchmarks as an organization. It’s more important to see how you measure up in your industry and how you can improve upon the status quo to rise up as an industry leader.
The tools to manage all this data are what makes business intelligence easier and more accessible to a wider range of businesses.
The tech tools that are available today for business intelligence and analysis is what makes 2018 so different from the BI of the past.
Data warehouses house huge amounts of information together in a single place and SaaS integration tools make it possible to pipe data across multiple systems in real time. Unlike in the past, where data was siloed into individual systems, a data warehouse pulls disparate data together for review and analysis.
Another fairly recent tool (at least relative to business intelligence as a whole) is Big Data. These data sets are large and complex, creating the need for specialized storage and new ways of retrieving the information. For instance, a company in 2018 can take their customer data – a large amount of information, but not massive – and put it together with data mined from social media. These two components together can help inform a company what customer sentiments are while indicating potential purchasing trends, helping digital marketing efforts, product decisions, and refining release schedules.
Cloud computing is an enabler of large data storage and analysis. Platforms like AWS and Azure have made storage flexible and affordable for companies, opening up BI to more than enterprise-sized organizations.
Probably one of the most important advancements for businesses is the development of rapidly created dashboards. Dashboards provide graphic representations of data so that decision-makers and executives can rapidly grasp the insights that the data is trying to convey. Dashboards allow non-IT business resources to drill down into the information presented in graphs and charts to gain a deeper understanding of the driving forces of the business as well a the industry. Plus, dashboards are easier than ever to create, with cloud-based tools like Klipfolio available with existing integrations to multiple potential data sources.
Thanks to all of the advancements in BI and the tools sets that allow data analysis to occur, business intelligence is available to nearly every business no matter how big or small. In fact, studies have shown that even small businesses benefit significantly from business intelligence.
In particular, cloud-based SaaS applications make bringing together data and analyzing it easier and more cost effective than at any time before. Small businesses without IT departments can quickly set up dashboards using the data from their existing applications to better understand their customers, their finances, and their path to growth.
In 2018, the real truth of business intelligence is that you must consider using it because of its availability and increasing simplicity. Even if you don’t make the investment in it, it’s likely that your competitors will.
We’re happy to share our expertise! If you have questions about how your organization can leverage your data or industry data to improve finances, operations, profitability or a number of other KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators), we certainly have answers to those questions!
Before we begin, this article is written for somebody with a moderate to high-level technical understanding. This is not a step by step tutorial on how to boost website performance, but rather its an information piece designed to give high-level management people a glimpse into how website performance works and how it can affect your organization’s technology.
Web optimization is a term that has multiple meanings. There is value in each. But when we speak of web performance optimization we specifically mean the speed at which your site loads and how well it responds to user actions. Poor performance can have far-reaching effects from abandoned sessions to reduced revenue. Investing in the performance of your web pages and apps can increase site usage, increase conversions, and even result in reduced hosting costs. There are several simple strategies that can help improve your web site’s performance and experts that can assist your organization in increasing the value of your web properties through optimization.
Websites have become as ubiquitous for the modern business as a company name or logo. Regardless of an organization’s size or purpose, a website is a cost of entry item for running a business. Meaning, whether a company has a site or not, you can be sure their competition does.
We are also well past the days of a site simply being a digital brochure. Dynamic page elements, product and service images, blogs, and forms are common website elements for all but the smallest organizations.
These sites no longer end at the desktop, either. Having a mobile experience is critical in a world where, according to consumer insight and research firm Hitwise, 58% of searches are now executed on a mobile device.
Extending beyond websites, today’s companies also host full-blown web applications, portals, and intra- and extranets. These integral pieces of an organization’s offerings and workflows go well beyond a simple HTML site. What all of these experiences have in common, no matter the purpose or intent of the web property is the need for a performant and seamless experience. Research from such experts as the Nielsen-Norman group has shown that users have expectations from websites and applications, and not meeting those expectations can result in unexpected and unwanted user behavior.
It’s easy as easy to say that a site should perform well, and just as easy to say that it’s not a priority for an organization if the full impact of the poor performance isn’t known. However, the impact of a slow or clunky site is both significant and well documented.
Performance and Visitor ExpectationsSite visitors have high expectations of web experiences. While one-tenth of a second feels instantaneous to a user, and one second still appears seamless to users, more than that can lose a site visitor forever. According to research conducted by Akamai Technologies, 18% of users expect a page to load instantly, which typically translates to 3 seconds or less. When it takes more than 3 seconds for a site to load, 40% of visitors will abandon the site.
When Facebook reviewed how performance affected traffic to its pages, they saw a 3% drop off in traffic in pages that loaded 500 milliseconds slower than other pages, and twice the dropoff rate on pages that took 1000 milliseconds more to load.
The effect is amplified for mobile site visitors. Akamai found that 74% of users will abandon a site that takes more than 5 seconds to load, and 46% of mobile visitors will not return to a site that performs poorly.
E-commerce sites are one of the easiest places to understand the direct impact of site speed improvements in relation to revenue and conversions, both because there is a direct revenue component that can be measured as well the substantial influence performance has on shoppers. Research shows that slow sites can influence shoppers across the entire experience, from initially landing on a site all the way through to check out.
As common as online shopping is today, many consumers are still leery of these experiences, especially for lesser-known or smaller online stores. Slow site performance only increases their hesitance. In a survey conducted by Radware, 44% of online shopper responding to the survey said they become anxious about the success of their transaction if a site is slow, with 51% of shoppers saying they will abandon a shopping cart on a slow site.
While not all carts are abandoned because of site performance, abandoned purchases result in an estimated global loss of $4.9 trillion to businesses. Any revenue recaptured from abandoned carts is a win for an online store.
Beyond the immediate concern of abandoned carts and sessions, slow sites can have a future impact on shoppers as well, having been shown to leave a poor perception of the overall brand.
Certainly, visitor and customer experience and their subsequent reactions to a slow site are important to an organization. However, a slow site can also have a direct effect on your business costs.
Many third-party hosting companies charge organizations for the bandwidth used to deliver their web pages to users after a certain volume has been reached.
This presents a conundrum for companies. They are willing to pay for that bandwidth because it means more visitors are coming to their site. But one of the reasons that sites may be slow is because of bloated resources used by the page. Organizations may be unnecessarily paying to have large pages delivered to visitors, while at the same time those visitors are frustrated by the slow response time of the site.
This is an issue for companies hosting their sites on their own servers, too. Bloated resources on web properties require they use more storage than is necessary or allocate greater bandwidth to their websites and applications than is actually needed.
The data makes it clear that web performance is a priority issue for any organization concerned with its website visits and online commerce. The process of improving the performance of your sites and applications is referred to as web performance optimization. While some refer to web optimization as improving the searchability of their website through improving SEO and SEM, web performance optimization is specific to the activities and testing related to performance..
Budgets, of course, can be an issue. Budget restrictions may put a company in the position to choose between search engine optimization and performance optimization. In those instances, it’s important to remember that the performance of your website will have an effect on search engine optimization as well – site speed is a factor used by Google when setting search rankings.
Once an organization has decided to prioritize performance optimization you can begin formulating a plan to address any issues.
There are two phases to building a performance optimization plan. The first is to quantify the current site’s performance. This serves two purposes – the first makes it clear where efforts should be focused, and the second builds a set of benchmarks for understanding if the implemented optimization strategies addressed the issues found.
The second phase, of course, is executing on optimization strategies specific to the issues discovered. While it may sometimes be difficult to know exactly what needs to be optimized, implementing the most obvious and easiest strategies, and comparing the results to the benchmarks from the first phase, will indicate where future work should be focused.
Measuring the performance of a site requires more than simply pulling up the site and noting how long it seems to take for it to load. While this subjective test may indicate a problem, it won’t provide the appropriate metrics required to ensure optimization efforts are meaningful and successful.
The ideal place to start benchmarking a site’s performance is with a tool built specifically for performance testing. Using the same tool to understand the initial metrics of the site and the subsequent measurements after optimization tactics have been implemented to ensure consistent results for comparison.
Not all site visitors enter from the home page. Thanks to search optimization efforts, a site user may land on almost any page on a company’s site, from homepage to blog posts to product and services pages. Testing internal pages will ensure that no matter how a visitor finds a site they are receiving the best, most optimized experience.
Testing should also encompass both client-side speed and server-side performance. Knowing where issues are occurring focuses optimization efforts, giving the biggest improvements with the least work while ensuring that teams are not playing hunt-and-peck with optimization strategies.
Organizations must choose whether to use free, open source or paid tools. The decision should be made based on the resources available to perform the testing and the skill set of the team.
Free tools may provide only a very high-level understanding of site performance issues, which may be appropriate if an organization is only willing or able to commit limited internal resources to optimization efforts.
If, instead, a company has skilled developers and testers able to commit time to customize an open source tool, deeper and more meaningful testing can be accomplished, resulting in a clearer direction for improvements.
There are also commercial development and testing tools, like Microsoft’s Visual Studio, that has built-in functionality for web performance testing. If an organization has already invested in a professional development or testing tool with site speed and load testing features, using that for the various benchmark and follow-up performance testing makes sense.
But for many organizations, even using a simple, free tool is beyond their abilities or resource availability. Yet they are still impacted by the effects of a poorly performing website. In those instances, organizations should find a trusted partner with extensive experience in web development and performance testing. Such a partner can quickly identify the most critical issues and remediate them.
Even organizations that have the appropriate resources can benefit from a partner experienced in performance testing and improvements. Leveraging the skills and experience of a partner allows existing resources to remain focused on crucial tasks. And with extensive experience in performance issue remediation, a consulting firm can find and fix problems quickly.
There are simple tools that give you a basic answer, or score, indicating how a site performs. Google’s free PageSpeed Insight Tool, for instance, gives a site score out of 100. When looking for a more in-depth understanding of where the web experience slows down, specific metrics can be used to gain insight into slowdowns and issues.
This metric measures how long it takes for a browser to receive the first byte of data from a web server indicating the web server’s responsiveness.
Full page load, or time to the last byte, is a measurement that reports how long it takes for the given page to load completely. If the time to the first byte is fast, but time to the last byte is slow, it can point to an issue on the page itself.
If a site has global visitors, it’s not enough to only understand how the site performs in the company’s local region. Geographic Performance measures the responsiveness of the web property in various other regions around the world.
Several types of tests fall under the category of load testing, including Stress Tests, Ramp Tests, and Server CPU Load testing. All of these measures how a site or application performs when placed under the stress of many connections.
Sites that are dependent on dynamic elements or content served from a database, like many CMS-driven sites, or those that store data retrieved from the sites can be adversely affected by a slow database. Measuring the responsiveness of a web property’s database can point to the need for database optimizations
There is a myriad of strategies that can be used to fine-tune the performance of your site. Listed here are some of the low hanging fruit of performance optimization techniques – those that will solve many problems and are likely to produce the biggest impact.
According to a survey completed by KeyCDN, 46% of web performance experts stated that image optimization should be the number one focus for anyone looking to improve web performance. Even saving an image at the proper size instead of forcing a browser client to download a large image and resizing can save precious milliseconds.
Caching allows sites to keep static web content in memory instead of returning to the server constantly to retrieve content and images that don’t change frequently. Modern content management systems (CMS) offer the ability to configure caching for a site.
Browsers contact the server to request web pages through a protocol called HTTP. Each HTTP request made to the server from the browser takes time. If a site or application is making many HTTP requests to load properly, a page can take longer to load than is really necessary.
Clean code in a CSS or JavaScript file is pleasant to read, but a browser processes each character in these files. Every comment, new line, and instance of whitespace is sent to the browser and require time to be parsed. Minimizing these elements reduces page load time.
Tweaking every millisecond of performance out of a web property leads to increased conversions, higher revenue, and better search engine rankings. But not all organizations have the resources with the right skills or the time to tackle web performance improvements.
However, increased web performance for these organizations is not a lost cause. Curotec has experts that can review a website or application and identify where the most performance gain can be realized. They know the tools and tuning strategies that can enhance an organization’s web properties performance. And in the end, Curotec can save you money by quickly finding and fixing performance issues, allowing your team to remain focused on your other business objectives.
Contact us if you’d like to consult with us about your web performance challenges.
145.5 million.
That’s the number of Americans whose data was exposed as a result of the Equifax breach announced in September of 2017. The number is staggering, and the company is facing intense scrutiny from the federal government and has opened itself up to state and local lawsuits.
While the Equifax breach caught all of our attention due to its size – and the likelihood that we were one of those with exposed information – it isn’t the scariest statistic regarding breaches. These large breaches receive extensive exposure in the media, but the truth is that many more breaches occur with fewer records compromised. Those incidents don’t make it to the nightly news or the headlines. But they occur far more frequently than the catastrophic breaches like Equifax, and no company is immune, regardless of size.
In a recent report by the Ponemon Institute, it was found that the global average for a breach was $141 per record. While there are a number of factors that go into that number, and the amount varies by region, one thing is clear – security breaches are an expensive issue that all companies must be ready for.
For the 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study, Ponemon Institute interviewed 419 companies that had experienced breaches in the previous year. These incidents ranged from as few as 2,600 records to as many as 10,000 compromised records.
The study focused on incidents where one of the following was exposed – either an individual’s name, debit card, financial record, or medical record. This kind of information, known as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), gives hackers enough information to create system accounts, credit records, or worse in the case of medical records.
The study also identifies three main reasons these incidents occur. Human error and system glitches are two of the reason, with the third – criminal or malicious attack – being the most prevalent and costly.
As noted, the study found that the cost, per record, of an enterprise data breach, is $141. That number reflects the average cost across global companies. But for American companies, the cost is greater.
The average cost for the U.S. was $225 per record, $84 more than the global average. In addition to the cost of detection, remediation, and escalation costs, the United States companies must follow strict notification policies based on regulations. Because of this, notification of a breach to those potentially affected made America’s costs the highest in this category.
The cost of a breach also depends on the industry of the organization. Public sector and research companies saw the lowest costs associated with an incident, with the associated costs being $71 and $101 per record, respectively. Healthcare and financial services, however, experienced costs almost double to triple that amount. The per-record amount for financial services averaged $245, while healthcare saw an average of $380.
All of this resulted in the estimated average of $3.6 million per incident.
To say that small businesses are not immune is an understatement. In fact, the damage done to a small business by a security breach can be devastating, even though the overall cost may seem smaller.
According to Security Magazine, the average cost of a data breach for a small business is $36,000 to $50,000. Compared to several million, this may seem trivial, but it has a far greater impact on a business that is less likely to be able to absorb these costs.
Recent years have seen an increase in attacks on smaller companies. These attacks increased to 31% last year, up significantly from 18% only two years before. That’s because more than 70% of attacks specifically target small businesses.
While it may seem like enterprises are a better mark for attacks, small businesses present an attractive, almost irresistible target, for two reasons. First, these businesses are generally unaware of security threats. Second, these businesses have a greater exposure to threats, exactly because they are less aware. It creates a vicious cycle that is difficult to escape without help and training. Only 15% of small business owners say that they are “very knowledgeable” regarding persistent threats.
The financial impacts of a breach are only part of the equation, for both enterprises and smaller companies.
Losing customers is the biggest concern for companies that have experienced a breach, and this loss of customers leads to an increase in the financial impact. The Ponemon 2017 study found that global companies that lost 4% of their customers from a breach could see the overall average cost of the incident increase to $5.1 million. American companies experienced the greatest blow from lost customers, as well.
For small companies, the effect of a breach can be disastrous. Recovery from an incident may be impossible. In fact, it’s estimated that 60% of small to medium businesses that are hacked go out of businesses within 6 months of the breach.
The costs of a security breach are enormous, regardless of organization size, and its effects can be devastating. Yet many companies, particularly small and medium businesses, don’t make security a priority, even with the devastating effect it can have. Understanding potential holes, addressing concerns, and proactively managing risks can mean the difference between a prosperous organization and one that is out of business.
There is no single line of defense that will protect you from a breach. Rather, you need a number of layers of defense in place to keep your security practices up to par. However, here are a few of the things you should be doing to stay safe:
These points listed above are the high-level essential items that you should be keeping in mind for your organization so that you do not suffer a major data security event. It’s important to know however that not every organization is the same and each case should be handled differently based on the type of data you’re storing, what you’re doing with it and where the potential exposure points are. If you’d like a professional evaluation of your security posture, don’t hesitate to give us a call for a free initial consultation.
Recently, Curotec was ranked among the top three web design firms in Philadelphia according to the Manifest. Since 2010 Curotec has been providing results-oriented web development, technology consulting, and software integration services to a variety of firms in online retail, healthcare, life sciences, and financial technologies.
Curotec was featured as the most experienced Magento and E-Commerce Developer in Philadelphia in Clutch’s Press Release of top B2B service providers based on 3rd party independent research performed by the DC-based research firm. Additionally, we were recognized as a leading top 10 web and software developer in similar categories by Clutch. Reviews from our clients on Clutch.co agree. According to the firm, Curotec is a five-star company that can meet all your software, web and e-commerce needs! Our portfolio of work includes building highly functional custom web apps, well designed and aesthetically pleasing websites, and user-friendly apps. All of our employees are passionate about the work we do and we pride ourselves on delivering high-value results for every project we work on. We would not have won these awards if it wasn’t for the amazing team behind each and every engagement we take on.
In the below diagram developed by Clutch, you can see where Curotec is positioned as the number 1 market leader by ranking highest in both ability to deliver and area of focus.
By following the Agile methodology, we go through an extensive process to design, develop, test, deploy, and perfect every project we do. You can rest assured that we will not stop working until your project both meets and exceeds your expectations. At the end of the day, your project deserves only the best and when you work with Curotec you only get the best of the best. Curotec welcomes you to contact us so that we can start working towards making your next business technology initiative a success!
But greater bandwidth became more accessible and the browsers and servers became more efficient at serving pages. Developers optimized their code, streaming made it possible to watch video without having to download an entire video first, and caching made even the most graphics intensive pages load quickly.
Then we experienced the Web’s second evolution – mobile browsing. Mobile has rapidly moved from an occasional convenience to the main method of Web access for some. In fact, it’s estimated that 3.5 billion people worldwide only access the web through their mobile phone. That number is expected to grow to seven times as many by 2021. With more than half of today’s Web searched being done on a mobile device, it’s clear that a mobile-first approach to web development is the only way to go.
But mobile browsing still experiences some of the same challenges that we had in the early days of the web. Slow page loading and spotty network access can lead to frustrated visitors. Google found that around 53% of consumers will abandon a website that doesn’t load in 3 seconds. But you have no control over a mobile user’s network access or performance.
Just as the first evolution of the Web led to more efficient page delivery, so will the next evolution, and it’s already begun. In 2016, Google and Twitter spearheaded the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, and from that grew the idea of Progressive Web Applications (PWAs). PWAs are so important that Gartner research director Jason Wong said it wasn’t about if are going to use them, but when.
A Progressive Web Application is part mobile application, part mobile web experience, and all user focused.
A PWA has an icon on your homescreen that makes it look like any other mobile application. The functionality is very app-like, and regardless of network connectivity or speed, loads quickly for a seamless experience.
However, unlike a mobile application, a PWA has a very small memory footprint. They aren’t downloaded from an app store, and they don’t require multiple versions to support all available mobile platforms. Instead, a single implementation of a PWA works on all platforms that support the technology (at the time of this writing, Apple does not support it).
A PWA isn’t a mobile application, and it’s also not a web page although it’s derived from one.
Because it’s not a mobile application, as we mentioned above, it’s not downloaded from an app store like Google Play. This means there is no delay while awaiting validation and approval. Instead, a PWA can be made available to your audience as soon as you are ready for release.
However, decoupling PWAs from mobile applications doesn’t make it just what we used to call an app-wrapped web page. Instead, it uses a combination of mobile and web technologies to provide an optimal user experience on a mobile device.
The other thing to note is that, because PWAs aren’t mobile applications, they don’t have access to the full extent of native platform functionality that a mobile application would have. So, where a mobile application can leverage the device for alarms, phonebook access, and various hardware sensors, PWAs do not have access to these features.
Some of the value of PWAs are apparent from the above paragraphs, but let’s break those down a little more and add a few as well.
Despite Apple’s current lack of support, PWAs are designed to work independently of what mobile platform it’s on. What this means for the end user is that the PWA will look and act the same, and work, no matter what mobile platform they choose to use.
The benefits are pretty significant for the company publishing the PWA as well. Developing a mobile application for your entire audience meant nearly full development life cycles for multiple versions. Even though the requirements might be the same, divergent apps needed to be developed, tested, deployed, and maintained. For a company with a dedicated development team, it meant additional headcount just for mobile application support. For those without it, it resulted in contracts for initial app development as well as updates.
PWAs were specifically designed to handle questionable or unstable network conditions. The idea was to ensure that the user could use the application regardless of their current network access. PWAs use caching as well as code called Service Workers that act as the proxy intercepting and responding to network requests.
Push notifications have been proven to increase user re-engagement in mobile applications. But mobile web experiences didn’t have the ability to recapture the interest of the user.
Since PWAs are a hybrid mobile web experience and mobile application, they can use push notifications to return the user’s attention to your content and functionality. Users who enable push notifications are more engaged, have better retention and have great app usage longevity that those without the notifications.
It was always clear that a web page on a mobile device was just that – a web page on a mobile device. But PWAs allow for a more mobile application type feel thanks to the use splash screens. And because PWAs are full screen, just like a native mobile application, it’s hard to tell one from the other.
Being visible on a mobile search is becoming increasingly important. Mobile friendly web pages receive special attention from Google, too. But this is an area where native applications fall short of web pages, with little or no SEO pull beyond promotional pages for the app. PWAs, on the other hand, can be easily indexed by search engines.
Responsive websites aren’t going away today, and there are still valid business cases for mobile applications, especially ones that require certain mobile device functionality. But, if experts like those at Gartner and Google are to be believed, PWAs will be the new standard in web interactions.
Web development and design trends are no different. Now is the perfect time to reflect on the newest functionality, layouts, and looks for the web as organizations consider updating their sites as part of their 2018 initiatives.
What follows are a few of the trends we expect to see in the coming year.
Over the years, web development has increased and improved personalized experiences for visitors. But creating a highly personalized or interactive experience was a technical challenge.
All that changes in 2018. Visitors have always desired a more interactive experience with websites and brands. Content like games, quizzes, and polls give customers both an entertaining experience and one that satisfies the desire for an individualized experience.
There is also value to brands in creating these interactive experiences. As visitors answer questions and seek out personalization, brands are able to gather deeper insights into their customers and potential customers.
This year, expect to see interactivity drive customers to relevant experiences on websites, offering up content that matches the insights uncovered through their answers and interaction.
Since the early days of the web, layouts have been based on a grid. Even as good web development stopped the use of tables for layout, and CSS enabled better placement of page elements, sites continued to create pages that followed a very conventional grid model.
Website design is freeing itself from these constraints. Designers will begin to push the limits of layouts, moving away from ordered presentation and more toward broken grids. Part of this is driven by a trend known as brutalism.
Companies have used popups and interstitials to ensure that visitors see messaging and information that the brand feels is important. But popups have always been seen as a nuisance to users, breaking up the flow and diverting users from the information important to them.
Popups have been on a decline for some time, but 2018 will be the year where popups all but disappear. Much of this is driven by Google. The search giant announced in 2016 that they would begin to punish sites that used the invasive messaging strategy, but its take some time for companies to start to feel the pain. As search rankings suffer, you can expect brands to drop popups as a means of communication with visitors.
The early days of the web gave us static sites that provide information to customers and potential customers. But if your question wasn’t answered by an FAQ, or you needed more help, you still needed to place a phone call to get your problem resolved.
As the web evolved, so did customer service available online. Customers could talk directly with representatives from a brand to help with issues and questions. The problem remained, however, availability of customer service agents to assist with issues.
Chatbots have changed that and will continue to make headway in the new year. With chatbots and AI, companies can help customers faster than before, even when customer service resources aren’t immediately available.
CSS3 brought breakthroughs in motion and animation without the use of Flash. Like a kid with a new toy, web developers and designers used these code-based animations as frequently as possible, adding movement to their sites but sometimes overwhelming or distracting users from the real message.
In 2018, CSS-driven animation will mature. Instead of elements moving just to look cool, pages will contain animation to help users find what they are looking for, or intentionally draw attention to specific page elements. This purposeful use of movement will result in better user experience.
Mobile has replaced the desktop in the race to the top of web usage. More users turn to their phones and tablets for search today than to their desktops. Mobile applications have matured and well designed, but it’s difficult to get customers to give up precious system memory for your mobile app.
Enter progressive web applications. Progressive web applications are websites that look and act like mobile applications, with nuanced user interfaces and sophisticated functionality that customers have come to expect from mobile applications.
Like fashion, web design goes through evolutions. Recently was the flat movement, where layout and design used little layering and blocks of color.
This year’s evolution will include big, bold designs combined with minimalism. Sites set for redesign (or initial design) in 2018 will use bright colors and high saturation, taking advantage of all that modern monitors have to offer. Well designed sites will be clean and easy to use, focusing on vibrancy and user experience.
Also expected for sites redesigned in 2018 will be the decline of stock photography and an increase in unique photo content. Photos will move from muted and boring to colorful and interesting in their own right. You can also expect to see more variation in the people depicted in site photos, including greater inclusion of people of color and women.
That’s the number of Americans whose data was exposed as a result of the Equifax announced in September of 2017. The number is staggering, and the company is facing intense scrutiny from the federal government and has opened itself up to state and local lawsuits.
While the Equifax breach caught all of our attention due to its size – and the likelihood that we were one of those with exposed information – it isn’t the scariest statistic regarding breaches. These large breaches receive extensive exposure in the media, but the truth is that many more breaches occur with fewer records compromised. Those incidents don’t make it to the nightly news or the headlines. But they occur far more frequently than the catastrophic breaches like Equifax, and no company is immune, regardless of size.
In a recent report by the Ponemon Institute, it was found that the global average for a breach was $141 per record. While there are a number of factors that go into that number, and the amount varies by region, one thing is clear – security breaches are an expensive issue that all companies must be ready for.
For the 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study, Ponemon Institute interviewed 419 companies that had experienced breaches in the previous year. These incidents ranged from as few as 2,600 records to as many as 10,000 compromised records.
The study focused on incidents where one of the following was exposed – either an individual’s name, debit card, financial record, or medical record. This kind of information, known as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), gives hackers enough information to create system accounts, credit records, or worse in the case of medical records.
The study also identifies three main reasons these incidents occur. Human error and system glitches are two of the reason, with the third – criminal or malicious attack – being the most prevalent and costly.
As noted, the study found that the cost, per record, of an enterprise data breach is $141. That number reflects the average cost across global companies. But for American companies, the cost is greater.
The average cost for the U.S. was $225 per record, $84 more than the global average. In addition to the cost of detection, remediation, and escalation costs, the United States companies must follow strict notification policies based on regulations. Because of this, notification of a breach to those potentially affected made America’s costs the highest in this category.
The cost of a breach also depends on the industry of the organization. Public sector and research companies saw the lowest costs associated with an incident, with the associated costs being $71 and $101 per record, respectively. Healthcare and financial services, however, experienced costs almost double to triple that amount. The per-record amount for financial services averaged $245, while healthcare saw an average of $380.
All of this resulted in the estimated average of $3.6 million per incident.
To say that small businesses are not immune is an understatement. In fact, the damage done to a small business by a security breach can be devastating, even though the overall cost may seem smaller.
According to Security Magazine, the average cost of a data breach for a small business is $36,000 to $50,000. Compared to several million, this may seem trivial, but it has a far greater impact on a business that is less likely to be able to absorb these costs.
Recent years have seen an increase in attacks on smaller companies. These attacks increased to 31% last year, up significantly from 18% only two years before. That’s because more than 70% of attacks specifically target small businesses.
While it may seem like enterprises are a better mark for attacks, small businesses present an attractive, almost irresistible target, for two reasons. First, these businesses are generally unaware of security threats. Second, these businesses have a greater exposure to threats, exactly because they are less aware. It creates a vicious cycle that is difficult to escape without help and training. Only 15% of small business owners say that they are “very knowledgeable” regarding persistent threats.
The financial impacts of a breach are only part of the equation, for both enterprises and smaller companies.
Losing customers is the biggest concern for companies that have experienced a breach, and this loss of customers leads to an increase in the financial impact. The Ponemon 2017 study found that global companies that lost 4% of their customers from a breach could see the overall average cost of the incident increase to $5.1 million. American companies experienced the greatest blow from lost customers, as well.
For small companies, the effect of a breach can be disastrous. Recovery from an incident may be impossible. In fact, it’s estimated that 60% of small to medium businesses that are hacked go out of businesses within 6 months of the breach.
The costs of a security breach are enormous, regardless of organization size, and its effects can be devastating. Yet many companies, particularly small and medium businesses, don’t make security a priority, even with the devastating effect it can have. Understanding potential holes, addressing concerns, and proactively managing risks can mean the difference between a prosperous organization and one that is out of business.
If you’ve been living off the grid or hunkered down to avoid the wrath of mother nature, you might have missed the big news from last week. Equifax, one of the big 3 credit reporting entities in the United States, reported a security breach of epic proportions.
The breach involved Personally Identifiable Information (PII) for roughly 143 million people in the US alone, or close to 1 in every two people. Data lost included names, birth dates, and addresses, but also extended to social security numbers, credit card numbers, and in some cases driver’s license numbers.
To exacerbate the problem, Equifax’s handling of the response and notification has also consumers and experts alike concerned with their ability to address the issue. In fact, the incident is so severe, and the management of it so questionable, the House Financial Services Committee will be holding hearings to gain a better understanding of what this means to consumers and the country.
What might be the most damning, however, is how the breach occurred. Currently, signs point to Equifax having fallen to one of the most common security vulnerabilities known – a SQL injection.
Yet, while a company entrusted with the wealth of personal information that Equifax had stored on consumers should have taken greater precautions, hacks like these are called common for a reason. Many companies fall prey to them. Others don’t even know they should be testing for them. And still, more rely on a single point of failure – a developer – to be the one to hold back the tide of hackers trying to get at your company’s data.
So, what are the most common web vulnerabilities your company should be looking for? And how do you effectively, and consistently, ensure the security of your data?
While not a complete list, these are some of the most common – and therefore, serious – vulnerabilities in web applications.
HTTP does not provide functionality for user authentication and session tracking, so this must be handled by the web applications. Because of this, developers must be vigilant to ensure that session data is encrypted at all times, otherwise, it provides opportunities for hackers to hijack a user’s session during an active session.
With a cross-site request forgery, a third-party site attempts to request access to a web application that a user is already authenticated to. Examples are social media sites, financial institutions (banks, credit cards sites), and email clients. Once access is obtained, the malicious site can then access functionality on the authenticated site, wreaking havoc on bank accounts and through email.
With the complexity of applications that are part of a web application ecosystem, it’s important that users and processes have the minimum security access that they need to get done their intended tasks. Unfortunately, either because of a lack of resource training or through systems allowing access to more data than is needed, processes and accounts may be able to see data or perform actions that they should have access to. Because of this, a malevolent user, or someone who can access a user or process account, can perform harmful actions that they shouldn’t be able to otherwise gain access to.
Validation is an important part of user submitted data when it comes to the security of your application. In a cross-site scripting attack, client-side scripts are injected into a site and can execute on pages that are dynamically generated leveraging user-supplied data can be at risk if the information isn’t validated. As a result, users can be redirected to a malicious site that appears like the original site or their sessions can be hijacked.
It’s believed that a SQL injection is what was used in the Equifax breach. Like a cross-site scripting vulnerability, SQL injection can occur when data coming into the site is not validated. In these cases, user-supplied data is input into a web application, but without data validation, a malignant SQL query and commands can be passed directly into the database. Equifax isn’t the only large company that has fallen victim to a SQL injection attack. The PlayStation breach of 2011 was also caused by SQL injection.
The good news is that most of the most common attacks are easily taken care of with education, testing, and consistency.
Developers, system administrators, and security staff should be well-trained to be aware of best practice for web application security. Knowing when encryption should be used on data, and how to minimize exposure to data through access control, can reduce system exposure to outside entities.
Education can also ensure that data cannot be injected into the site through foreign scripts or malicious SQL code passed through web application form elements. When developers are taught to limit form inputs and validate data, at least one attack vector is minimized.
But the entire burden shouldn’t be placed on the shoulders of the developers. While application testing is done, boundary testing – in other words, testing beyond what the expected use of an application is – can identify areas of potential vulnerability.
Beyond the areas of education and standards, though, regular full site testing can be invaluable. Penetration testing on applications that have access to sensitive data can inform improvements that need to be performed to secure your site. While internal teams can perform regular penetration tests, periodic testing and security audits by an outside partner can provide invaluable insights that might otherwise be overlooked.
Simple oversights in web application security can have devastating results, as the Equifax breach has shown. A common vulnerability can be easily exploited by hackers and cause life altering effects on millions. But even if your company doesn’t deal with the same level of sensitive data, you have a responsibility to your users and the enterprise to protect the data stored on your systems. Vigilance, education, and awareness are the greatest tools at your disposal to protect your organization from outside attacks.
E-commerce continues to grow at a rapid pace. If you’re thinking about starting an online storefront or adding the ability to purchase your products online in addition to a brick and mortar store, you’ve probably already considered some of the most common features that you’ll need.
Some of these features may include an easy way to add new products, the ability to quickly set up your storefront, the ability to set up sales and specials, store analytics, and integrations with payment providers.
But there are features that you may not be considering that can be just as important as the ability to import your products. Below we’ve called out 4 e-commerce features that you may not have thought of, but that can take your business to the next level.
When you first set up your e-commerce site, it may seem like the platform you’ve chosen has everything you’ll ever need. But you should take a step back and review what your company might need in the future, or at the very least understand that what you need today might not be what your customers will demand from you tomorrow.
Since it’s unlikely that you have a crystal ball to know what that might be, your insurance against your needs outgrowing your platform is to choose one that is extensible.
What does that mean? It means that you’ll be able to add functionality to your platform without having to bring in an expert to make significant changes to the core of your e-commerce platform. This not only allows you to add functionality as it becomes relevant, such as fraud protection, mentioned below, and customer service software, it also allows you to respond to your market as the needs of your customer base change. Additionally, it can allow you to amp up the security on your site by adding new innovations as they become available.
While having a site that is extensible means you can add pre-built components to grow your business and your platform’s functionality, choosing an open source e-commerce solution means that you can make your storefront into anything you want, with a little help from a knowledgeable technology partner.
Because open source software provides the code that makes up the platform’s functionality available, a skilled technology partner can help you change or add functionality to your storefront that may not exist otherwise. If you’ll need specialized functions to make your storefront the best it can be, going open source can be the most robust means of ensuring you get exactly what you want.
Remember, though – open source may not mean free. Some companies still charge for their platform, but once you are a licensed user you have access to the underlying code.
Payment processing is a no brainer for an e-commerce site. But with e-commerce fraud on the rise – fraud rates in 2016 were 33% higher than those a year earlier – you need to consider protecting those purchases as much as being able to accept them.
E-commerce sites typically leverage the Card Verification Value (CVV), located on the back of the credit or debit card, as a step toward ensuring a transaction is valid. But CVV verification is only a first step toward fraud prevention.
Outside services, like ClearSale, provide modules that can be used with various e-commerce platforms that can help verify the validity of a charge as well as identify the likelihood that a particular transaction may get charged back – something known as “friendly fraud”.
As your business grows, your ability to manage inventory, order fulfillment, and shipping management, along with your business will diminish. It’s at this point that many e-commerce retailers look to 3PLs for assistance with the inventory and order fulfillment needs.
A 3PL – or third-party logistics provider – can manage these elements of your business for you, providing you with benefits like reduced shipping time and cost, updated and streamlined warehouse procedures, and inventory adaptation and management based on demand.
However, adding a 3PL to your online retail business will provide fewer positives to your business if you need to manage orders directly. Instead, a direct integration to your 3PL will allow orders coming in from your website to flow seamlessly into your order fulfillment systems with your third-party logistics provider.
If you’re just starting out in the online retail space, some of these concerns may seem far reaching. But as your business grows, you’ll be glad you took the time to plan for expansion. Overhauling your e-commerce site shortly after setting it up is a frustrating experience and one that can be avoided when you consider a few additional features that will free to you to grow and build your business.
The definition of brownfield software development is the development and deployment of new software and systems in the presence of existing and legacy systems.
Sound familiar? That’s because unless you’re part of a brand new startup, you’re already doing this. It’s the reality for anyone working in an enterprise IT environment.
If we were all working within our “happy path” plans, we’d be able to develop new software and systems that immediately worked with our existing ones, and integration between system would be easy. But just like a 15-year-old car doesn’t have built in GPS, neither do legacy systems operate in the same way as new software.
Brownfield development must take into consideration how it will interoperate with the existing systems to prevent causing more problems than the new software solves.
The term brownfield is borrowed from the construction industry. Brownfield land describes a new building location that, in the proves of planning and construction, must take into account the area’s existing structures and work around those to prevent causing problems.
The value in brownfield development is that it extends the in-place systems. The critical piece is context – to understand the environment that the development is being done in so that it doesn’t disrupt current software operations.
To gain this value, however, the project cannot be planned or executed in a vacuum.
Many software projects assume a clean slate, or what is alternatively called a greenfield development environment. Requirements are gathered, schedules developed, and software is built.
Greenfield software is developed under the pretext that it is either standalone or that the system it will be inhabiting is clean a fresh. These kinds of projects are, for obvious reasons, extremely rare.
When projects must be developed in the presence of legacy applications, ignoring existing applications to develop a new application only adds technical debt to what is likely already overloaded IT schedules and resources.
When planning a new application within an existing ecosystem, gaining an understanding of the touch points between it and the applications it must touch is only part of the project’s considerations. The effect that the software will have on the system must be taken into account as well. End to end clarity of the enterprise architecture and the new application’s place within it can reduce the negative impact of its development.
When executing a brownfield software project, having the right brains considering the problem is the first step to success.
Go beyond those that will build the application and include on the team those that have an understanding of the bigger picture. This should include:
These team members should be included throughout the initial planning process. If you’ve engaged an outside firm to help with the development, make sure they are also included in these planning meetings.
Based on the agreed upon requirements and business needs, the team can begin building what is known as a minimally viable product.
By creating an application that accomplishes a minimum set of functionalities and placing it within the ecosystem, a better picture is gained around both the effect it will have on the systems and the unforeseen challenges of integration.
This requires building a product that actually works – this isn’t a proof of concept to be thrown away after. Instead, this product will be what future iterations will be built upon.
As your application goes through planning, you may discover that it needs to communicate with others in the ecosystem or access data from other parts of the system. While you may already have integrations between applications in place, this may be the time to re-evaluate the value of how you connect those applications.
These choices should be part of your early planning as they can impact your application design. Consider the following integration and application design patterns:
The likelihood is you’re already building in a brownfield application environment. But you’re also probably approaching your projects like they are greenfield endeavors. Stop ignoring the intricacies of developing against existing applications and instead include the resources and strategies to launch a successful software project.
