A website is your brand’s best marketing asset for getting your mission, product or service in front of potential customers. It ensures your message to the world, and drives a fundamental part of every organization or business. These days it is easy to create a website with very little technical experience or technical skills, which is great for small businesses, non-profits or any organization where every dollar counts. While tools have evolved to make website creation and curation more approachable, malicious users have also evolved and make a business out of disrupting your business.
Part of the spread of easily accessible and inexpensive website ownership is due in no small part to Open Source technologies, which give everyone an opportunity to have access to fantastic products with low to zero overhead costs. Open Source gives you the benefit of a world of developers, all chipping in to provide tools and applications that are equal to products that would otherwise cost you thousands of dollars in support and licensing each year. This is great news to anyone watching the bottom line, but many times people overlook the benefits of those support agreements that come with COTS (commercial off the shelf) software.
It is a great accomplishment to install (or sign up for) a product, set up your website and make it accessible on the web. However, making sure that your site remains accessible to users, consistent and secure are jobs that are never complete and often overlooked. You will often find a service that offers your a great deal, $3.95 a month, and 1-click install! But when it comes to making sure your site stays online, and is secure from malicious users, you’ll find the pricing suddenly increases, and the familiarity with the software, and change management are lackluster.
Many of the OpenSource platforms in the world are based on PHP, a programming language that is made freely available, and can be installed on any server architecture. These factors have allowed PHP to provide over 75% of all server-side programming language support. Unfortunately, with that large a presence, PHP is also the target of over 81% of all malicious traffic monitored in 2018. Most attacks target insecure code, and insecure administration controls [1]
Creative Liquid works primarily with Drupal as a content management system. While Drupal is widely used by the Federal Government, it does require monitoring and timely installation of security patches, and it benefits from being configured and installed properly and securely. Creative Liquid has extensive experience working with secure environments. From securing the installation and hosting environment to monitoring for security updates, testing updates and monitoring access logs, our team works to ensure that your site remains secure, and reliable. Our support agreements provide time for our team to monitor your site, provide recommendations for security posture improvements, and ensure your site and server software are kept up to date against the latest threats.