Your website and applications are your virtual real estate. Would you let your offices fall into a state of disrepair? Would you leave your physical premises vulnerable to unwanted access and theft? You need to take as much, if not more, care of your web presence or appoint a service provider who can demonstrate they will do so on your behalf. You should consider your website as one of your key business assets.
First, let’s consider Security.
In the same way your office could be broken into, someone (a hacker) could gain access to your website or application. This illegal access can be used to deface your website, use the site to access further sites, distribute illegal content, steal personal sensitive information, or simply disable your capability.
These types of cyber-attacks can happen even if your website is fully maintained and updated. You need a service that will significantly minimise risk of attack, but also recover quickly should one happen:
- Make sure your service provider has appropriate safeguards in firewalls, intrusion detection and network security.
- Make sure your provider can demonstrate its software and processes are secure and your data will be protected from data breaches and leaks (look for ISO 270001 and Cyber Essentials Plus certification)
- Make sure your provider has the appropriate backup structure. How often do they backup data? Where are they backing up your data to? How quickly can they restore your data from a backup.
Then there is performance.
A number of symptoms will demonstrate that your website performance is affecting your user experience and hence traffic through your website. You may find that the user experience is impacted due to slow loading of data and website pages. A visitor to a website is not going to wait around. You may also find that the website is simply unavailable at times when system capacity of your provider is not fit for purpose, or the system is susceptible to power or infrastructure outage/failure.
Managing performance comes with the right investments from your service provider:
- Make sure your service provider proactively maintains your website with regular software updates. These updates are often performance updates so if not updated performance and security risk is introduced.
- Make sure your provider can demonstrate its service is highly available and reliable. There is no point in having a website if you can’t rely on it being available. Potential clients will not find you and you will lose potential business.
- Make sure your provider has the investments in place to maximise traffic throughput even in busy times to maximise the user experience and is monitoring your system 24×7.
How Strategies Cloud can help you?
Strategies has more than 20 years’ experience working in website and software development. We have seen how businesses can get into trouble, and we have a Cloud platform that will provide that business peace of mind at a fraction of the price of a major Cloud provider.
Want to ensure your website is secure, ISO and Cyber Essentials compliant, optimised with proven availability?
