Securing Your Website: Protect Your Online Data

By Jaime M. Butler
Business Development Specialist, Integrated Enterprise Solutions

Over the last few years, with the increase in online consumerism, many businesses are opting to either create a new website for their company or give their current website a face lift. If you land within one of these categories, it’s important to make sure you’re focusing on more than just the design of the site and investing in the security as well. To ensure a new website launches on the right foot, consider the following tips:

Security Protocols
When it comes to securing a website, you’ve most likely heard of secure socket layer certificates, more commonly known as SSL certificates. These are cryptographic protocols that encrypt and authenticate data between servers, machines and applications operating within a network. They help prevent third parties from intercepting, altering or even recording sensitive information that someone may enter into a site. For example, if your business operates an ecommerce platform that asks customers to input credit card information, you’ll want to make sure to have this in place with the site hosting company to protect customers.

Uploading Media
A part of building or updating a website includes uploading media such as photos and videos. This is often done using file transfers but these items are often classified as unencrypted data, meaning that the information is easier to access by those outside of the host server. By enabling what is called a secure file transfer protocol, the data that is uploaded to the website will be encrypted when adding it to the hosting server and thus increasing security in the event of transferring sensitive information.

Enabling Firewalls
Another element of protection than can easily be added into the building process are web application firewalls. These are virtual walls that all incoming website traffic is funneled through before it reaches the host server. Once set up, this service actively monitors and blocks all malicious web traffic designed to record data about the site’s owner or visitors.

Adding Antivirus Protection
If you share a hosting server with other users, utilizing antivirus and malware protections are a must. While users are uploading files to the server there’s a chance one of those files could be unknowingly carrying a virus. If this virus hits the server, yoursite, and others on the server, could be attacked or even brought down.

When it comes to defending your business, the above tips can go a long way to protect you and its data. Whether you’re implementing them on your own or working with a web hosting service that monitors potential security risks on your behalf, including one or more of these security practices in your website development plan are guaranteed to be worth the investment.