In today’s increasingly tech-obsessed society, web and database server security is more important than ever. When it comes to the global business environment, it is very difficult to be a success if you don’t have a sophisticated company website. Web and electronic commerce sites are growing in number every day and so are the risks associated with them. Whilst organizations have always been able to protect their online systems with firewalls and intrusion detection software, these measures are just not enough anymore.
They can provide a degree of security, but they cannot guarantee complete privacy and safety for confidential documents and essential networking processes. When it comes to running a successful business, security vulnerabilities are the enemy – they cannot be tolerated. It is of the utmost importance that you have a secure IT environment that is safe from unwanted guests. Security breaches, hacks, and shutdowns can cause a company to lose large amounts of money. They also cause clients to question the safety of their personal information and business transactions.
Here are a few tips and tricks that you can use to keep your web and database servers secure.
1. Control Access & Enhance Online Security
No more than two or three extremely trustworthy individuals should have privileged access to the system at any one time. You should only ever give administrative control and privileges to colleagues or business partners that you trust implicitly. These people, and only these people should have the password needed to access the core system.
A site admin should configure an SSL certificate on their server to establish an encrypted connection between the users’ browser and the server to protect data transmission from MITM (Man-in-the-middle) and other cyber attacks.
You can get Positive SSL certificate of Comodo Certificate Authority (CA), which is basic SSL certificate available to validate & protect single domain hosted on your web server.
2. Keep Things Simple
Just because it is possible to combine multiple functions on a web server, doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea – especially if that server is exposed to the internet. Though it’s tempting to merge your database with your email server functions, it is not advised. A single server that is being used to run more than one application is a rich target for hackers, say the experts at InformationWeek.com. Once you have decided what specific function a particular server will carry out, remove all software not related to that function. It is a good idea to do this because simply disabling unused software or services is often not enough to prevent intrusions.
3. Think About Lockouts
If you run a small to medium enterprise, it could be a good idea to think about whether or not lockout procedures would benefit your security system, say the experts at ID Technology. Lockout systems are very common – they result in a user being temporarily ‘locked out’ of a system after a certain number of unsuccessful login attempts. Lockouts a very simple and effective way to protect the online element of your business. However, they’re not entirely suitable for large enterprises. A small number of legitimate employees will always manage to accidentally lock themselves out of the system – the more employees you have, the more risk there is of your IT department being flooded with ‘lockout’ issues.
4. Quarantine Incoming Material
It isn’t uncommon for a hacker to infiltrate a company system and then use it as a temporary cache. In order to prevent this, you either have to carefully monitor all incoming material or disallow incoming material altogether. If you want to minimize the risk but keep the ability to upload files open, you can cap the amount of disk space allocated to new material. Or you can place your system files on a separate drive and have uploaded materials rerouted to a ‘holding’ partition where they will stay until they are inspected.
