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Creating a safe shopping experience for art lovers
iCanvas helps customers find beautiful canvas art prints to make them happy, get them thinking, inspire them — or just make their space look cooler. To keep the shopping experience safe and convenient, the company wanted to be sure that third-party tools and libraries used on the website didn’t contain malware. Today, iCanvas uses Akamai Client-Side Protection & Compliance to continuously monitor the script behavior on its website. When Client-Side Protection & Compliance detects something suspicious, it flags the offending script on a dashboard and allows the IT team to mitigate the vulnerability with just a click.
Closing gallery doors to hackers who sneak in through web code
Shopping for quality canvas art prints on iCanvas is like visiting a gallery designed just for you. With just a click, you can sort artwork by subject, style, artist, or color — even by a specific room of your home. “We put a lot of effort into researching changing tastes and curating our artwork to match,” says Paul Kharitonov, CTO, who joined iCanvas in 2014. The company actively reaches out to artists whose work is shown in galleries, making the case that selling reproductions through iCanvas will give them greater exposure. Sales held strong during the COVID-19 pandemic, as people looked for art to spruce up their new home workspaces.
To create a safe shopping experience, iCanvas invests in employee education and advanced security. “Breaches are costly for online merchants like iCanvas because they can disrupt the business, damage brand reputation, and force IT to spend time on mitigation,” Kharitonov says. “We’re always looking for the ideal balance between security and a simple purchase and checkout experience.”
With [Client-Side Protection & Compliance] I can see the behavior of third-party tools and libraries on our website and mitigate vulnerabilities with a click.
Paul Kharitonov, CTO, iCanvas
Kharitonov wanted to mitigate a growing security threat — malware that hackers hide in web- page scripts to steal shoppers’ personal information, like passwords. “We use a major cloud provider’s analytics tools to understand website traffic,” he explains. “I have a lot of respect for the cloud provider, but if their tool were to be compromised, our website would be vulnerable, and I’d have very little visibility.” Manual investigations of suspected script attacks took too much time. “Even if you’ve already narrowed down the investigation to a specific script or situation, manual investigations can still take a day or two — and it’s still easy to miss threats,” he says.
Sounding the alert when a page behaves suspiciously
Kharitonov found his solution in Akamai Client-Side Protection & Compliance. “With [Client-Side Protection & Compliance] I can see the behavior of third-party tools and libraries on our website and mitigate vulnerabilities with a click,” he says. “And since [Client-Side Protection & Compliance] works with any CDN, we didn’t need to spend time and money on major changes.”
iCanvas was among the first companies to use Client-Side Protection & Compliance with a CDN other than the Akamai Intelligent Edge, so Kharitonov worked with Akamai to test various use cases. Client-Side Protection & Compliance delivered — detecting and mitigating suspicious behavior in scripts iCanvas had developed, as well as in third-party scripts. “Installing [Client-Side Protection & Compliance] was a breeze,” Kharitonov says. “It was as easy as injecting the JavaScript reference to the tool in our templates — pretty remarkable for a tool that brings so much value.”
Stronger security, same great customer experience, no added IT burden
iCanvas introduced Client-Side Protection & Compliance, a new web application firewall, and a more secure payment processor simultaneously. Kharitonov deems it a winning combination. “I measure [Client-Side Protection & Compliance]’s success by what isn’t happening,” he says. “No more time-consuming manual investigations. No changes to the easy shopping and checkout experience our customers love. And no added IT burden. [Client-Side Protection & Compliance] basically runs itself.” Not having to manage Client-Side Protection & Compliance freed the IT team to move full speed ahead with other initiatives, growing the iCanvas business in 2021.
Summing up the value of Client-Side Protection & Compliance for iCanvas, Kharitonov says, “If everything goes well with a security solution, you don’t hear about it. Business runs as usual, and you stay out of the spotlight.” Put another way, when customers visit iCanvas, the only thing they leave with is artwork to brighten their spaces and spirits.
About iCanvas
iCanvas sells the highest quality canvas art prints, priced for every art lover. From stretcher to frame, canvases are handcrafted in the company’s plant in Morton Grove, Illinois. The company works with hundreds of leading artists to curate a deep selection for all styles of art — helping people around the globe find art they love. www.icanvas.com