Magento 1 end of life - make your move before it's too late

While your Magento 1 site won’t automatically fail after June, it will no longer be supported. This means there will not be any further improvements or security patches for the platform and your site and data will be exposed to external threats that could compromise your business. What’s more, without Magento support, your site’s functionality is likely to rapidly deteriorate, which could result in poor customer service and lost revenue.

The risks are significant

There are many significant security risks for organisations that fail to upgrade an unsupported Magento system before June 2020. Any software vulnerabilities will no longer be addressed with updates, leaving sites at the mercy of hackers. These threats are real – potential attackers know the vulnerabilities of Magento 1 sites and will target them. Possible risks include:

• Distributed Denial of Service Attacks – target websites and other online services with the aim of overwhelming them with more traffic than the server or network can accommodate. The goal is to render the website or service inoperable.

• Spam Registrations – bots continually create fake user accounts so they can post malicious links to your site or overwhelm your site and database.

• Brute Force Penetration Attacks - hackers continually target an encrypted file with multiple username and password combinations until they find the correct details in order to steal data or bring down the site.

There are also compliance risks to consider, and the impact that security breaches could have on your customers. For example, if the checkout on your site is no longer secure, hackers may be able to access your customers’ data and payment details. This could leave clients susceptible to fraud – and your company on the wrong side of GDPR and data protection legislation.

The chance to explore your options

Some organisations currently running Magento 1 will of course look to move across to another Magento platform. But we speak with many companies that are taking this opportunity to review their ecommerce requirements in a wider business context.

These companies are thinking about the kind of customer experience they want to offer and how they can incorporate more personalisation, targeted promotions and real-time features like stock updates into their online offering. They understand the benefits of integrating their ecommerce platform with accounting systems such as Sage – and they’re asking us to help them gain competitive advantage with a best-in-class ecommerce solution.

With the right technology partner to help you identify the challenges, explore the options and weigh-up the merits various ecommerce options, you can be confident of making the best choices as Magento 1 nears end-of-life.

If you would like to see Aspidistra ecommerce in action, join us with Paul Belworthy of Aspidistra for an online demonstration.