October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and it’s a great time to review how your company is protecting your most valuable data and client information.
This year’s awareness month theme, courtesy of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is “See Yourself in Cyber.” The goal is to educate internet users at all levels about their personal responsibilities in protecting the networks and data they use. That includes:
- Enabling multi-factor (2FA) authentication
- Using strong passwords
- Recognizing and reporting phishing emails and communications
- Keeping your software updated
For managed hosting clients at Informatics, you can rest a bit easier knowing that we’ve got that last point handled when it comes to your website and online applications.
How We Protect Your Website & Data
As one of the Corridor’s leading managed hosting providers, Informatics’ App team focuses on creating resilient and highly available environments for our hosting clients.
That means staying up to date on the latest updates and patches, monitoring traffic with the help of advanced AWS tools, and creating the necessary backups in case of a catastrophic event, among other activities.
That’s very different from low-cost hosting providers, which simply provide server space to host your website. When it comes to updates, monitoring and security, you’re largely on your own.
That’s typically when we see network breaches, cross-site scripting, ransomware, and other scary incidents that can jeopardize your business.
Some of the things our certified experts do to secure your applications and data include:
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- Building and maintaining web application firewalls that keep out bad traffic and common vulnerability attacks
- Patching applications, CMS systems, and other public-facing sites, all of which will eventually have their vulnerabilities tested and publicized by hackers
- Creating comprehensive data backups, to ensure we can easily restore your data in the event that a cyberattacker finds an entry into your systems.
- Leveraging best practices to create business-specific security plans. We know that ecommerce websites are different from general brand websites, and the different types of security tactics they require.
4 Recommendations for Cybersecurity Awareness Month
We asked the Informatics App team to offer up some of their top recommendations to current and potential clients on how to secure their websites and data in the months ahead. Here they are, in no particular order:
1. Sign up for Informatics’ CMS Protection Plan
CMS vulnerabilities are the most common way that attackers can gain access to your website and backend data. We can keep your website CMS updated automatically as new patches are released, ensuring your systems are always their most secure.
2. Use a password manager
Strong passwords are still the best defense against outside intruders, and a password manager like LastPass (used here at Informatics) makes that a lot easier. Your passwords should be a complex string of letters, numbers and symbols; a password manager can keep them organized for your entire organization, thereby preventing the impulse to make all of your passwords “password” or “123456”.
3. Budget for software upgrades
For those with custom software, make sure your annual budget includes funding for necessary application upgrades to protect against new vulnerabilities. Remember that anything that’s public-facing will be probed and explored by attackers, so even if your app is secure now, there’s no guarantee a vulnerability won’t be found in the future.
4. Improve your teams’ phishing and digital security knowledge
As a managed hosting provider, we do our best to ensure that your applications are as secure and updated as possible, but cybersecurity is still a human issue (as CISA’s theme for this year points out). Continue training your employees and team members on digital security best practices, test your systems for common phishing or hacking attacks, and ensure that team members are making full use of multi-factor authentication, password managers and other security tools.
Considering how complex and aggressive today’s cyberattacks have gotten, good cybersecurity really requires a team approach. Here at Informatics, we’re ready to help build your team and ensure your website and applications meet or exceed digital security standards. Reach out to us or fill out the form below to discuss your website’s security with our certified team.
Need to tighten your online security security?
Our certified experts can handle all of the details so you can worry less.
