3 reasons why web designers need cloud security

Businesses of all sizes have been turning to cloud services for various solutions — including their business protection. In fact, cloud adoption is growing much faster than anticipated. A Goldman Sachs study showed that cloud computing infrastructure would grow at 30 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2013 to 2018. The cloud has shown a measurable impact on businesses, and 19 percent of company growth is linked to the adoption of cloud solutions.

Starting your own website design company is hard enough. You must focus on your client’s needs and customize your website design service. A thorough cloud security solution is so important because a single intrusion could cause a domino effect for your company: You could be penalized in Google search results, lose sales, and the value of your services would dramatically decline.

1. Cost Flexibility

One of the biggest benefits of cloud computing services is their cost and server flexibility. For instance, the cost of cloud computing is much more manageable than traditional methods. With cloud computing, you can scale your cloud solution and pay for exactly what you need. During peak times, you can provision additional capacity that can be de-provisioned when no longer necessary.

This can also help you avoid server crashes when traffic on your site is too high. For example, you could have a web template sale that you’ve been marketing for weeks, but the influx of traffic may cause your server to crash and you to lose sales. With flexible bandwidth control, you can expand your capacity during the busy times but then scale back when your sale is over.

2. Data Security

There are many reasons why a website would be hacked. It could be because of a personal grudge against the owner of a website, for political reasons, or downright malicious reasons.

It’s crucial for web designers to protect their work and client payment information. A cloud computing security solution has various security protocols to prevent your website from data breaches. There are several threats you need to be aware of when working with clients and storing and processing information online:

Data Breaches: During a data breach, confidential or protected data is viewed or stolen by an unknown individual. That information can be used to do anything from stealing intellectual property to stealing a person’s credit card information. Yahoo recently had one of the biggest data breaches of all time, with almost half a million compromised accounts.

Data Loss: Data loss occurs when a person fails to create a backup of their property. Data loss could also occur during a malicious attack on your server. An estimated 7 percent of data loss occurrences come from malicious attacks.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS): DDoS attacks are some of the most common website attacks. During this type of attack, the website is sent a large flood of external requests, making your site and potentially a host of others on the server unavailable to its users. Usually, these types of attacks target IP ranges, ports, or entire networks, but they can be targeted to any service or device.

On the other hand, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks occur when a single computer connected to the internet attempts to overload a server with packets. Of this type of attack, there are three varieties:

• Volume attacks: an attempt overwhelm a site’s bandwidth
• Protocol attacks: packets attempt to consume network or server resources
• Application layer attacks: requests are made to crash the web server

Cross-Site Scripting (XXS): During an XXS intrusion, attackers inject malicious scripts into harmless websites. Users who are unaware of this execute a script from what they believe to be a trusted website, giving hackers access to information held in session tokens or cookies from that site. This type of attack is usually executed to gain access to a website’s user accounts.

3. Support System

Having cloud computing for your web design means you have an entire support system behind you, allowing 24/7 protection for your company’s assets. Built-in redundancies ensure your company’s application and website are always online. One of the most important jobs of cloud security solutions is preventative security measures. This means, the chances of your website design business being compromised is fairly low. In the rare occurrence, that an attack or data loss occurs, you have a dedicated prepared to step in and fix the situation.