Mid-level business consultants may spend their days at mid-size or large companies; they may pass their days from anywhere in the country. All the same, they maintain a common objective: to better manage the risks associated with their company business concern. More and more, organizational Web application security represents a large part in taking care of that assignment. A great many of companies place tremendous faith in their website design and development departments. Incredibly often this trust is undeserved and managers should be more vigilant.
Increasingly, companies depend on enterprise-level Web applications in order to successfully conduct business. Corporate applications typically incorporate the use of forms to interact with an individual’s data. For instance,, get dates of birth, associated with other personal information or e-mail and user satisfaction feedback. A business Web developer in Anchorage, Alaska, for example, is tasked to design and develop many categories of data gathering applications.
Sadly, the increased use of corporate Web applications makes them very attractive to hackers. As the number and complexity of enterprise level Web applications becomes larger, so do the number of vulnerabilities brought into your organizational Web activities. Crucial encroachments continue to focus on corporate application hazards. All told, the amount of vulnerabilities associated with corporate Web applications has businesses all over the world scrambling for solutions to these concerns. Don’t put on the blinders and lose track of the other organizational data stores. The database design and development team’s performance should also be reviewed very closely.
As security violations grow more sophisticated as time passes,
failure to properly protect your corporate Web applications leaves your firm open to incredibly time and resource intensive errors. These incidents can place at jeopardy sensitive customer data or the insertion of malware or viruses.
Particular business risks of these types of attacks include:
Loss of revenue and business opportunities;
Objectionable media coverage;
Company loss of reputation;
Unwanted scrutiny from consumer advocates; and
Litigation.
In addition, if your business is legally under the obligation to guard the privacy and security of personal information, and cyberpunks access this sensitive data, your enterprise can run the risk noncompliance with a variety of mandated legislative conditions, including Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) and Sarbanes-Oxley, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). The PCI DSS, For instance, was designed to guard from harm credit and debit card data by assuring reliable and safe electronic commerce. Recent updates to the PCI standard cover supplementary requirements for corporations to safeguard Web-facing applications or be confronted with noncompliance. The public today has little tolerance for businesses who don’t practice sound Web security practices.
The moral of the story is that, as a manager, you must remain vigilant to the ever-present security threats against not only your Web applications, but also your other systems, such as your databases and physical data.
