User experience and security – not the most harmonious of relationships. Few companies have been able to truly marry the two; meanwhile, the majority of organizations battle it out, sacrificing security for look and feel, or new products are pushed to the wayside because there isn’t a compatible security plan. News continues to break in the wake of the recent Yahoo! data breach – most notably, Marisa Mayer’s conscious decision to sacrifice security for streamlined looks and new product development. This is an extreme case in which millions of accounts were stolen in an egregious online attack, but it points to the constant battle between two factions. At what point do you risk user experience for a more robust security protocol, or threaten the accounts under your protection to give those same users an unforgettable online experience?
Though there are two distinct camps in the user experience and security discussion, there is a telling real-life event that occurred involving Google and Yahoo! in 2010. According to the New York Times’ account, Chinese military hackers breached a number of computer systems and online accounts owned by US technology behemoths. Google dove headfirst into ensuring an attack of this magnitude would never occur again. Co-founder Sergey Brin sprang to action and immediately made cyber security his top priority by hiring hundreds of security engineers and investing in security infrastructure. It should be noted that both user experience and security are able to peacefully coexist. Yahoo!, however, was slower to adopt the needed changes, and Marisa Mayer’s entrance did little to help the situation. After she took over Yahoo! in 2012, new product development became a sole focus despite looming security threats that had yet to be fixed since the initial attack. Though Yahoo!’s internal security teams pushed for changes, their suggestions were met with extreme pushback and more often than not were completely overridden in favor of a streamlined user experience.
The types of responses and response times behind an online attack or breach are key to comprehending the backbone of any company. User experience is important, granted, but there is an argument to support security as a part of the user experience. With one in five small businesses experiencing an attack, and 60% of those going out of business because of the blow, the time is now to work on improving the relationship between the user experience and security for your company’s future. With 24x7x365 management and monitoring solutions that are customized to every business’s needs, Neovera will ensure the safety and security of your data without impeding on future business goals.