44%
of confirmed retail breaches in 2025 involved ransomware
2025 retail industry security reports
Why cloud security is critical for online commerce
Unlike a fixed on-premise setup, an e-commerce cloud environment keeps changing: new third-party integrations, scaling for sales peaks, frequent deployments to keep pace with marketing. Every change is a potential opportunity for misconfiguration, and cloud misconfiguration (overly permissive access, poorly secured storage) remains one of the most common causes of data leaks in this sector.
High-traffic commercial periods — sales, Eid, back-to-school, Black Friday — concentrate both peak revenue and peak attack attempts, which makes the robustness of the cloud infrastructure directly tied to commercial performance during those periods.
Concrete risks for an e-commerce site or retail network
Overly broad access rules (IAM) sometimes give marketing or support teams direct access to order or payment data they don't need — a compromised account on those teams then becomes a direct path to sensitive data. Third-party integrations (payment solutions, marketing platforms, CRM, chatbots) also multiply entry points, each with its own security level, outside the retailer's direct control.
Credential stuffing attacks and customer account fraud attempts increase mechanically with traffic volume, particularly during high-traffic periods, where they blend more easily into legitimate traffic noise.
What cloud security means for a retail business
Serious cloud security starts with an audit of the architecture and access rights (IAM), followed by targeted hardening of the checkout journey and payment flow, aligned with PCI-DSS requirements. The goal isn't just to fix a point-in-time state, but to embed security checks into the deployment pipeline, so each site update doesn't introduce a new flaw.
Preparing for traffic peaks is part of this approach: an architecture that can scale securely, so operational pressure during sales periods doesn't push teams to bypass existing security controls.
Go further
See the full presentation of Cloud Security or all our solutions for Cybersecurity for Retail & E-commerce.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Yes, to a lesser extent. The shared responsibility model applies: the SaaS vendor secures the underlying infrastructure, but configuring your store, your third-party integrations and managing your team's access remain your responsibility.