All new E-commerce businesses should address one vital question first and foremost: Will you collect and store payment card information on your Web site or offload credit card processing to a PCI Compliant merchant like Paypal? The answer to this question is paramount and should be well thought out when you are planning and developing your E-commerce Web application.
When feasible, outsourcing the storage and handling of credit cards to a trusted, capable, and PCI compliant payment processing provider is the most secure and most budget-friendly course of action. Even when you outsource payment processing (the riskiest piece of running an E-commerce business), you still must ensure your hosting environment can deliver speed and scalability that meets user expectation and includes security measures that protect your shoppers from a damaging hacker encounter.
Here are the tools and services that you should be looking for:
Web Hosting Security Basics – the minimum requirements you need to transact business securely online
Redundant firewall protection — Firewalls help stop cyber attacks before they can penetrate the network perimeter. Having firewalls tuned and working in tandem helps ensure protection for your E-commerce environment.
Web application protection – In addition to traditional firewalls, you’ll need a Web application firewall (we call them WAFs). This technology helps protect E-commerce organizations from application-level attacks like SQL injections and Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. Application-level attacks is where the hacker is attacking the website itself; your contact forms, login boxes, etc. Traditional firewalls are helpless to these kinds of attacks and WAFs are required.
Following serious breaches in data security, most notably a 
