Keeping your Magento site secure and supported with Managed Services. Establishing your Magento eCommerce presence is a big project. You need to determine what you need your site to do and how you will measure success, pick a partner, and, oh yeah, execute the project.
Our eCommerce implementations follow the same methodology every time. We work in phases to ensure a successful project. And while the Define, Design, Develop, and Deploy phases are, obviously, crucial for getting your site set up, don’t forget the final phase: support.
The support phase is important to keep your site running as well as it can. Whether it’s day-to-day maintenance or a future upgrade, your Magento site isn’t a “set it and forget it” tool. It takes ongoing nurturing and attention to make sure that it continues to serve your organization as best it can.
The truth is, there will come a time in your site’s future where you will need the help of a development team. Whether it’s to install a security patch or make adjustments as your business grows, changes will need to be made.
So, who handles support in an eCommerce project? You have two options: you can handle it internally, or you can keep your consulting partner onboard.
In-house eCommerce support is a great option if you have the resources for it. Ideally, your organization would have the staff to dedicate a full-time eCommerce manager to your site. This person should be involved in the Magento implementation from day one and then continue onto site monitoring. One tool to help keep your Magento site secure is their new Security Scan tool.
Security Scan allows merchants to regularly monitor their sites and receive updates regarding known security risks, malware, and unauthorized access. This tool provides 30 security tests to identify potential security issues like checking the installation of Magento patches, configuration issues, and whether or not security best practices have been followed.
Merchants who choose to utilize Security Scan will also benefit from:
Scans can be scheduled for specific dates and times, and scans can be set up as recurring or on-demand. This free Magento service can be run on any version of Magento Commerce or Magento Open Source.
While these scan results can be incredibly helpful for Magento users, if you don’t know how to execute the remediation steps for failed security tests, then it’s not so helpful after all. And what could be worse than knowing your site needs support but not having a team to perform it? In that case, we suggest entering into a Managed Services agreement with our team.
For many organizations, reallocating resources for support or hiring on a new developer just isn’t in the cards. Most companies can get bogged down in the hassle of recruiting, hiring, and maintaining a development team. In fact, most support work doesn’t require a full, 100% dedicated team to maintain. Maintaining full-time support staff can be an expensive undertaking without providing valuable benefits.
By going with a Managed Services contract instead, your organization can have access to our team of talented, trained, and certified developers when you need them.
When leveraging a Managed Services contract, your organization can have access to our team of talented, trained, and certified developers when you need them. Not only will you receive services like transaction monitoring, testing, and protection from CloudFlare’s Unmetered mitigation of DDoS attacks to maintain performance, uptime, and availability, but you will have a commitment from our team to timely maintenance and support at a lower rate.
Not only is the rate lower, but it isn’t broken down into specific tasks. Instead, your time can be allotted to content, design, architecture or patches, upgrades, reports, or anything else your site might need that month.
This option is a great choice for organizations to establish ongoing support and keep the door open for future site updates. The goal of Managed Services is for our team to have the time and resources to provide the utmost monitoring and protection services to our clients.
Think of it this way: if your site is down for half of a day, how much money have you lost? What if that happens a few times over the last two months of the year? The money you’re saving by keeping your site up could pay for a Managed Services agreement.
We’ve been implementing Managed Services for a few clients now, and we have seen the benefits of the program first hand. For instance, when running an eCommerce site, there are certainly a few worst case scenarios that can come to mind. But the worst of the worst? Having your site crash on Cyber Monday. That nightmare became reality for one of our clients last year.
We were working with a B2C retailer to migrate their site from Magento 1 to Magento 2. Their site was still live on Magento 1 on Cyber Monday of 2016, which was shaping up to be a successful day for our client. They had a good amount of traffic and were hitting their sales goals. Then they experienced a DDoS attack.
Their site was up and down for the remainder of the day and they were experiencing denial of service on a semi-regular basis. No site wants to experience this setback on a regular day, but especially not on the biggest online shopping day of the year.
While the damage to their profits wasn’t as bad as it could have been, this was still an incident that our client had no interest in repeating. Along with upgrading their site to Magento 2, our team has implemented a Managed Services plan for this client to ensure that this doesn’t happen again this Cyber Monday.
One of our longtime clients recently entered a Managed Services contract with our team. While their reasoning behind it was to secure resources for ongoing maintenance and updates, an emergency situation with their site really cemented their decision as the right choice for their organization.
Our client was experiencing a unique situation: in the middle of the night, a bug would change their homepage to a randomly selected product description page. This situation certainly wasn’t ideal, and they couldn’t get to the bottom of it. Luckily, they had a set number of hours with our team available each month. They brought the issue to our team’s attention and our developers were able to fix the bug for no additional fee.
This is an example of one of those unexpected eCommerce issues that you don’t see coming. You can, however, plan for a surprise issue by making sure you have a support staff ready to tackle the problem at hand.
Are you interested in seeing how a Managed Services contract could benefit your Magento site? Contact our team to learn more.
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