In the web, where everything is vulnerable to attack, no one desires to keep a website wide-open to attacks. Small and Medium Business (SMB) website owners invest quite a lot to attract quality traffic, but no one wants a malicious bot scanning your website for sensitive data or anything which can be used for spamming your customers. Hence, it is instructive to have an additional technology which filters the incoming traffic for your website. However, there was no easy way to set up such security, until Cloud website security services were available.
Choosing Cloud-based website security services
Why choose Cloud services?
Sure, you can start by hiring a website security expert, arrange for dedicated software to run on your server (may have to buy dedicated hardware for it). You incur considerable setup costs and open up your budget for recurring update-cycles (which is exceptionally essential for effective security). Or, you can sign-up with a Cloud website security firm, and erase the need for setting up hardware/software. Setting up the Cloud service usually takes minutes, involving usually DNS setting changes.
What to look for in Cloud website security services?
Once you sign-up for Cloud website security services, all the incoming traffic to your domain goes through their servers. The incoming traffic is profiled and filtered in real-time, and only legitimate traffic is allowed in. So, what are the attributes that you should look for in a Cloud website security service?
- Sophisticated Identification service– the security service must include sophisticated identification, so as to accurately differentiate between legitimate traffic (which includes human visitors, spider bots) and illicit visitors (like malicious bots from spammers, hackers et.al.)
- Protection against latest threats– The update cycle for the service should be frequent enough, to give protection against the latest attacks.
- Should have Web Application Firewall–It should have a web application firewall, which gives protection against pertinent attacks like SQL Injection, Remote File inclusion etc.
- Minimal setup requirements– The service should not demand additional hardware and should have a minimal software installation (preferably none!) and settings.
- Should include global CDN–Since you are including an extra server for the traffic to go through, it’s necessary to ensure that there’s an acceleration in content delivery. Inclusion of global Content Distribution Network (CDN) optimizes website performance by caching content and injecting packets right into the Internet Backbone rather than subnetworks.
- Extra protection against DDoS attacks– Distributed Denial of Service attacks are the most common form of attacks against SMB websites and are difficult to protect against.Hence the website security service should have extra layers of measures against DDoS attacks
- DSS compliance– Since the data from the visitors pass through these services, if you have an eCommerce website, then the service should be in compliance with the necessary Data Security Standard.
Cloud website security services provide the kind of security, which would otherwise have been prohibitively expensive for small and medium scale businesses. Within minutes, and with almost no additional hardware or software, you can have your secure website. After all these, the choice to have a Cloud security service shouldn’t be difficult for you.
