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Article by Sam Martin, PE, CVS, President of OfficeOnWeb, Technologies. 4/1/2000

It is April 1st. How safe is your web site? Business sales conducted on the web is projected to reach over 1.5 trillion dollars by the year 2003. Almost every business is coming to grips with the fact that they need a good web presence. In future, no business can afford to be without both a phone number and web site. As of March, a domain name is being purchased every 5-seconds.

So now that you have a web site, how do you protect it and your online customers? Also, now that you and your employees are conducting business on the net, how do you protect the computers in your office? Here are some tips.

Make sure your web site is hosted on a commercial server with adequate protections against hacker attacks. Thanks to hackers, February 7th was the day of the biggest changes in the net in a single day. Access servers throughout the nation, including our own dial-in service, were attacked by hackers and generated "denial-of-service" for almost everyone. The big shots, Yahoo, MSN, Amazon, Buy, CNN, eBay, US West, and others were down for as little as 2-hours and as much as three days. Access systems were the major types of sites hit. Thus people that did not obtain commercial hosting services from Office On Web or similar services found their business sites were unavailable. Your hosting service needs to have firewalls, long password protection, tape backup, and SSL technologies in place. Use a long password that gives you security from the newest cracker software. Ten or more characters are preferred, using both numbers and letters.

Make sure that your web site's ordering system is designed by a professional that can adequately place sensitive materials behind the firewall AND encrypt it from prying eyes. Firewalls can be breached. Make sure that your user ID and password is required for ALL operations. The ordering system should also have an alarm feature that notifies the webmaster if someone tries to enter the site without authorization.

Make sure that your public data and private data reside on two different servers. Web servers are by nature designed to be accessible for the world. By having a program that automatically moves data off the web server to a protected server that is only available on-line upon your request, your data is much more protected.

Protecting your business computers is an ongoing process. Make sure you have a virus protection program installed on the mail server and on each machine. McAfee is my personal preference. Do a virus update every month. If someone sends you an attachment, approach with caution. Only open an attachment if you know that the person is reliable. If someone sends you an ad in an attachment, delete it without opening it.

Have browsers set with a higher-than-default security setting. Enabling cookies is actually a good idea, but you can have them dropped after every session to protect your surfing privacy. You can also specify known safe and unsafe sites.

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Did you know that in 1998 more than 95% of OfficeOnWeb's new customers made a profit from their web site within their first year of operation? Sad, but it is true. This compares to less than 20% industry wide ever even breaking even. Why? Professional and directed expertise. This industry average for people leaving their current web service provider is 4% per month! That's nearly 50% over a year! Ours is less than 1% per year. That is because we endeavor to make our clients money and don't just offer a "pat solution" that we know has a low probability of ever making our client a profit. Some of the features that make up the level of success that our clients enjoy are:

 Five redundant backbone connections

 99.999% up time on UNIX servers

 Redundant OC-3 connect to all five backbones

 Full data center services

RAID 5 system with weekly backup of critical systems

 True Web Developer Services

 Large support site for clients and visitors

 Four level or higherencryption on all e-commerce solutions designed by Office On Web (this is the government standard required if Government people are to use a site)

 We NEVER host a commercial site on an access server (that is really bad, but common in dial up providers)

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