Tech Lover 9

A Recent research reviewing SMB’s website traffic showed that 51% of web site traffic is non-human, and that 31% is potentially damaging and includes automated malicious traffic from scrapers, hackers, scanners and spammers.

With these numbers, no one wishes to leave the website’s “front door” wide open. Website owners work hard to attract quality legitimate human traffic, but it’s as important as to identify and filter out the “bad” visitors – bots that can steal customer data, access proprietary business information, hack and disable a site, and worse.

SMB Websites are Attacked with Increasing Frequency

A study by WhiteHat Website Security published at 2011, found that 64% of websites were attacked in 2010. Of these, the most harmful attacks were DoS (Denial of Service) and network application attacks as SQL Injection & Cross Site Scripting. Amazingly, the study also found that 40% of the attacks were against small- to medium websites, and that this percentage is growing.
Despite this clear trend, until recently, there was no easy-to-setup, efficient and affordable solution for SMB website security. The available solutions were expensive and appliance-based, and required resources that most of the SMBs didn’t have.

The Solution: Cloud-Based Website Security Service 

Cloud-based security solutions (as Incapsula) have lately become more and more popular among SMB websites, since they provide easy-to-setup and affordable protection against all existing and new threats, while also providing website acceleration which reduce page-load time and improve the website visitor experience.

How it Works

When joining such cloud-based service, Instructions to change the website’s DNS settings are presented. Once the changes are completed, website traffic is routed through the service’s globally distributed network of data centers. Incoming traffic is intelligently profiled in real-time, blocking all the latest web threats. Meanwhile outgoing traffic is accelerated and optimized with a global CDN for faster load times, keeping welcome visitors speeding through.

What to Look For

When considering a cloud-based website security service, a number of key factors should be taken into account, notably:


No hardware or software; Setup in minutes: Joining the service should take no more than a few minutes, and should involve only a DNS settings change. No software or hardware installation should be involved, nor any changes to the website.

Website acceleration: The service should include a global CDN which improves website performance by caching and optimizing its content and delivering it directly from the Internet’s backbone. This results in much faster load times and significantly less bandwidth consumption.

Simple PCI Compliance: Since these kind of services transmit customer data, eCommerce website owners must ensure that the service is in compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Protection against DDoS attacks: These services should include DDoS protection services that are easily activated in minutes on a monthly subscription with on-demand upgrade options, eliminating the need to purchase any equipment.

Website Analytics: Services should provide access to a dashboard including real-time stats for all website traffic as human visitors and bots, performance statistics and detailed threats reports.

Conclusion

Cloud-based website security services allow all websites – from small to large, to protect and accelerate their websites in an easy to setup, simple to use and affordable way – without having to require the skillset of a website security specialist or allocate expensive resources to maintain the service.