All the planning and preparation in the world won't prevent an incident, but it can greatly reduce the consequences.
Nothing better prepares you for responding to disaster than experience. In the world of web applications, sometimes we act as firefighters, coming in to rescue the smoldering remains of a hacked site, a crashed server, or an unexpected traffic burst.
No matter how diligent you are at preventing vulnerabilities and securing your environment, it's impossible to be completely secure on the Internet. What you can do is plan for how to limit the damage that people can do when they manage to compromise some part of your system. This line of thinking is called "Defense in depth" -- you can't just apply security updates and call it good.
It amazes me that still in 2011, the standard way web designers upload code to a server is FTP ("File transfer protocol"), a protocol that is completely insecure, easy to snoop, slow, hard to use, and often problematic through firewalls. There are many better ways.
How would losing your web site affect your business?
That might seem like a silly question, but a surprising number of small organizations don't think it can happen to them. Think again -- web sites get lost all the time, through a variety of means. The server hosting your site might have a hardware failure. Your site might get hacked. Your web developer might accidentally delete something critical. Your host might go out of business, leaving you stranded. If you're in the tech world, you hear about these incidents all the time.
Just the other day I got a request for proposal for hosting, complete with a statement that they knew of some hosting that would cost $15/month. The implication being that they were looking for a hosting proposal that would not exceed that amount.
Businesses are increasingly interested in investigating and implementing Open Source technologies to help cut licensing costs, increase security, and stay ahead of their competition. Whether your organization is looking for web development using an Open Source platform, maintaining a Linux server, or simply exploring a shift towards the Open Source world, Freelock can help you navigate through the hundreds of options to ensure your systems are working for you.
At Freelock, we provide targeted, semi-managed hosting of Linux-based web applications to help ensure that your website stays secure and online. We lease our own dedicated servers, both physical and virtual, and have full control over the OS and all the software, including your applications. This allows us to fully support everything above the hardware layer to an extent that few other companies do.
The Register is running a story today about a botnet--a network of compromised computers--that is under the control of hackers. Is your computer one of the bots? For a surprising number of people, the answer could be yes.