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Month: June 2019

How to Secure Your Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Today, many organisations and enterprises are moving into a more hybrid cloud environment. And why not? Hybrid clouds are agile – they adapt and change to the needs of the organisation. With their unique mix of private,on-premises clouds and public clouds, you can get the scalability, low cost and reliability of a public cloud, while you can get the security, control and customisation and flexibility of a private cloud- It is the best of both worlds. It is projected that by 2020, almost 90 per cent of organisations would have shifted to a hybrid cloud environment (source). However, due to this flexibility and these two worlds (private and public) the security of a hybrid cloud becomes a bit more challenging. In this article, we’re going to look at how to secure hybrid cloud.

What is Hybrid Cloud?

Simply put, a hybrid cloud is an environment that uses a mix of third-party public clouds and on-premises, private cloud – with orchestration between the two. When workloads move between these two platforms – the private and public clouds – you get greater flexibility and more data deployment options. This allows you to respond to computing changes and business needs with agility. Sounds good right?

In order to establish this unique cloud computing environment, you need the availability of a public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) like AWS (Amazon Web Services) Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure. Secondly, you need the construction of a private cloud (either through a cloud provider or on your own premises). The third component is a good Wide Area Network (WAN) connectivity between the public and private cloud. Finally, you need to make sure that your Hybrid Cloud is secure. This is where the matter of hybrid cloud security comes in – why is it important and what does it entail?

Hybrid Cloud Security

While you may have a firm grip on the data in your own private cloud, once you begin to venture into the public cloud space, things become more complex. As more enterprises move to a hybrid cloud environment, more data security concerns arise. These are the top concerns:

  1. Cross-Cloud Policy Management:
    While policies and procedures within the organisation’s private data centre are set, these policies might not transfer well when it comes to the public cloud. Therefore, the challenge is to create, configure and maintain a security policy that is uniform across the entire network. This includes firewall rules, user identification/ authentication and IPS signatures amongst other things.
  2. Data Leaks:
    A key issue for data security administrators is data visibility. When it comes to deciding where data should be stored, organisations must put in the time, care and a tremendous amount of thought. And even then, it’s easy to lose track of the data without ensuring proper data visibility.
  3. Data compliance: 
    Before organisations can move data and applications to a service provider cloud, they must make sure they understand all regulatory compliance laws that apply to their data – whether that’s customer credit card data or data spread across multiple geographical locations. Ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the organisation to make sure data of any nature is well-protected. Cloud providers and Cloud web hosting service providers will tell organisations which compliance standards they adhere to. If more is required then the responsibility lies with the organisation to spell out those needs.
  4. Scalability: 
    All security tools, procedures and practices need to be scaled for growth. If that hasn’t been done, companies can hit roadblocks because they neglected to build a security architecture that scales itself to the organisation’s infrastructure resources.

This brings us to the final question: How to secure Hybrid Cloud?

While hybrid cloud environments are more complex, there are multiple hybrid cloud security solutions and practices organisations can put in place, to keep it secure.

  1. Isolate Critical Infrastructure: Organisations store incredibly sensitive data on the cloud. However, access to this data needs to be isolated and restricted to a few key personnel, or those who specifically require it.
  2. Securing Endpoints: Using the cloud infrastructure does not remove the need for endpoint security. Often, threats and attacks start at the endpoint level. Accordingly, enterprises and organisations need to implement proper endpoint security by choosing comprehensive security solutions that offer application whitelisting and browser exploit protection.
  3. Encrypting data: Data – in transit and at rest – needs to be encrypted as a security measure. Organisations must also protect data, while it’s being used and processed by a cloud application. This will ensure that the data is protected for its entire lifecycle. While encryption methods vary according to service providers, organisations can choose the encryption method they prefer and then look for hosting providers who offer the same.
  4. Back up Data: It is essential that organisations backup their data – both physically and virtually – in case an attack or system failure leads to a loss of data (either temporary or permanent). Backing up data for your website and other applications will ensure that the data is accessible at all times.  
  5. Create a continuity and recovery plan: It’s vital that organisations create a backup plan to ensure that operations continue to run smoothly in a time of crisis (this could include power outages at data centres or disruption of services). A recovery plan could include image-based backups, which will create copies of computers or VMs, which can be used to recover or restore data.
  6. Risk Assessment: One good practice for organisations to follow is to constantly update risk assessment and analysis practices. That way, organisations can review the cloud provider’s compliance status and security capabilities. It also allows organisations to look at their own internal development and orchestration tools. Organisations must also keep an eye on operation management, monitoring tools, security toolsand controls – both internally and in the public cloud. Vigilance like this allows security teams to maintain clarity and confidence in the controls that are currently in place and will give them time to modify them if required.
  7. Choose a Reliable Web Hosting Provider: When choosing a Cloud Hosting provider for your website, organisations must look at the security capabilities. The service provider should be aware that security is a key concern and they should provide adequate security measures to keep your data safe. Good Cloud Hosting providers use the storage systems to ensure unshakeable stability. This ensures that you don’t have to worry about the loss of data due to hardware failures.

Ultimately, every hybrid cloud security issue has a corresponding solution. The trick is to identify specific problems early and then create a comprehensive security solution. If organisations do that, they will end up with a powerful hybrid cloud that functions smoothly, is easy to manage and remains secure.

5 Reasons to Avoid Cheap Or Free Cloud Hosting

 Choose the Right website hosting is crucial to the success of your online business and so is the choice of the hosting provider. A quick google search would list a number of web hosting services for you to choose. From cheap to costly the options are many and at first glance, the price can be an important factor used to convert visitors to customers. However, not everything that is cheap is wonderful, sometimes it might just prove to be not worth it in the long run.

In this article, we’ll talk about cheap or free cloud hosting and list down 5 reasons why it is best to avoid such web hosting services. So without further ado, let us begin!

What matters?

There are several features customers look out for when it comes to choosing web hosting for their website – performance and speed being the top two, with Cloud Hosting being the best bet. And in this quest of finding the best hosting service, we often times neglect another important feature – cost.

This is probably because we see a lot of hosting companies offering free or cheap web hosting with reasonable features and it seems like the best bet especially at the start. Be that as it may, a free or cheap web hosting can really mess up your website resulting in poor performance and unhappy customers.

Whether you are considering going for cheap Cloud Hosting due to limited funds or have already purchased it, we ask you to scroll down and consider the 5 reasons you should avoid free or cheap cloud web hosting for your website.

5 Reasons to Avoid Cheap Cloud Hosting

  1. Poor Page Load Speed 
    Cloud Hosting, in general, is known for its fast page load speed and scalability. In fact, according to a report by Hubspot, the ideal page load speed for a website’s HTML should be less than 1.5 seconds. Given these statistics, it is evident that Cloud Hosting is the most logical choice for blazing fast website speed. 
    However, with cheap Cloud Hosting, there are two factors to be considered:
    1. Is the Cloud Hosting cheap always or
    2. Is there some promo going on 
      If the prices of Cloud Hosting are always on the cheaper end, chances are the server is hosted in a Shared Hosting platform. Here multiple websites share the same server which, in turn, might impact the page load speed of your website. However, if the case is the latter then do your research thoroughly because the Cloud Hosting might be good and the provider might just be running the promo to up their sales in the competitive market.
  2. Negative impact on SEO and rankings
    Speed impacts SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Google considers page load speed while determining the page rank it assigns to a particular page. In fact, this is of utmost importance when it comes to mobile searches.If your website speed is slow then your page will load slower from the server end which would eventually affect your google page rank. Thus, cheap Cloud Hosting has a negative impact on SEO and page rankings.
  3. Uptime/Downtime issues 
    Cheap hosting spells server issues. If the server your website is hosted on is down there will be a lot of downtimes. This is mostly true because multiple websites share the same server space and there is limited bandwidth. Thus, if a particular website receives heavy traffic it might not only affect the performance of that website but also of the other websites hosted on the server. Moreover, if your server faces a lot of downtimes, it will indirectly affect the uptime and your website may not recover as fast as it should have.
  4. Security Concerns 
    Everything comes with a price! Cheap or free Cloud Hosting doesn’t guarantee security. This means your website is vulnerable to security flaws, malicious viruses and so on. Furthermore, with multiple websites sharing the same server and a lack of firewall can increase your security concerns. You may have your own security in place, however, if the server is compromised all is lost.
  5. Customer Support 
    Most cheap or free hosting services do not offer managed support to their clients. This means that if you are not tech savvy you might land yourself in a glitch. Before choosing a free hosting provider, make sure to check if they have good customer support via calls/emails/tickets/chats. If you feel anything is lacking then it is wise to not go ahead with the deal. After all, good support is helpful in times of need.

Conclusion:

Cheap Hosting may seem like a lucrative option at the start, however, in the long run, it is far more expensive than a slightly high priced hosting might be. So the next time you are tempted to opt for cheap Cloud Hosting we suggest you go a step further and research if it is really value for money or just making a hole in your pocket.

We at ResellerClub offer affordable Cloud Hosting that assures blazing fast website load speed with the use of varnish cache, impeccable support, 99.9% uptime, high performance and scalability. Check out our Cloud Hosting plans.

If you have any queries or suggestions feel free to leave them in the comments box below!

7 Steps To Get Increased Brand Loyalty Through M-commerce

Have you thought about how you can increase your brand loyalty? There are many ways to do that but m-commerce is one of the best ways.

M-Commerce, that is, selling on mobile devices, is an absolute must for any business. According to Statista, by the year 2021, almost 54% of all online transactions takeplace by Mobile retail Commerce (M-commerce) as opposed to the traditional E-Commerce platforms. And that is logical too, after all, mobile devices are by definition more convenient. Added to that fact is the situation that Google, is now employing a mobile-first rule, meaning that its rankings will prioritize mobile-friendly sites above everything else. So, if more than half of your potential market is mobile-based, and Google no less is ranking sites by their mobile accessibility, these are two very good reasons to start developing a brand loyalty strategy via M-Commerce.

  1. Keep it simple

Mobile platforms don’t need bells and whistles. In fact, those same decorative elements actually end up having a detrimental effect by sending potential customers elsewhere due to over-complicated and messy pages. Keep your message clear and concise, and allow the customer to do what they want to do easily and simply. Anything extra is just overkill. Take a look at the AcademicBrits website and see how they handled a lot of information but added simplicity as well.

Overkill Example
Good Example

2. Quickly reveal value

We live in an impatient society, that’s a fact, and online it’s even more cutthroat. Just like in the previous point, get straight to the point and reveal instantly what value you can add to the customer. Don’t hide away terms and conditions, lay them bare, so the customer knows exactly what they are getting involved in, and allow them to take the plunge quickly. As for rewards, don’t make customers work too hard for them. Keep them within easy reach. If you don’t do it, someone else will, and there goes your customer.

3. Make your site customizable

Another challenge for developers is that, as well as being simple, a mobile site must also be customizable. After all, no one wants a site that provides a host of unnecessary information and/or products. This is all part of a society that demands instant gratification, so allow your site to be customized in a way that it only displays the content that the user wants. It should be responsive for mobile devices, obviously. Make sure it loads quickly and that it provides a great user experience that feels seamless and effortless.

4. Provide memorable user experience

Quite simply, nothing is really enough if you can’t produce some sort of emotional attachment to the user. Nowadays, people want imaginative and relatable experiences from the mobile sites they visit, and big data is not enough. To stand out from the crowd, you need unique experiences and content.

“What we are talking about here is the term ‘big emotions’. This means that nothing else will do, and this is a huge challenge for developers and marketers. How can you create an emotional connection with your customer?” asks Sindy Peltier, a tech editor at 1day2Write and Writemyx.

Customers are looking for an experience that provides a ‘wow’ factor that very first time. Once you have that first memorable user experience safely tucked into your belt, the next time becomes that little bit easier.

5. Engage the Audience

A huge part of building a brand relationship is engaging the customer in the first place. That can be through any number of methods, but you have to maintain the conversation and show that you genuinely listen by taking feedback at every opportunity and using it. Meaningful engagements can be secured through the site itself, or through social media channels. Thus, you need to ensure that your communication quickly becomes an engagement.

“Personalize that communication. In the past that used to be incredibly time consuming, but now automation software makes this a very accessible technique. It helps to develop an individual relationship which can be invaluable to a growing brand,” argues Lyndsay Stephens, an M-Commerce expert at Britstudent and Nextcoursework.

6. Use brand partnerships

Utilizing a well-considered brand partnership is a really smart way of developing your reputation and quickly securing a loyal following. Not only is it an extremely financially viable technique of growing exposure by piggy-backing onto the already established marketing presence of another brand, by selecting the right brands to get involved with, it shows the customer that you are looking out for them by bringing together two (or more) products or services that you understand they are seeking. It increases convenience, and aligned together with reward schemes, can actually result in infinitely better customer experience with meaningful savings and perks. That is a sure-fire way of building a relationship to last.

In summary

The stats don’t lie. Mobile platforms are the present and the future of E-Commerce transactions, particularly with the increasingly creative ways of making payments and accessing information. Creating a mobile-friendly platform is therefore not just smart, it is essential when growing brand loyalty and seeking to increase the number of active engagements and conversations. Follow these simple steps to achieving a brand strategy that takes your business to new heights.

All You Need to Know About Hypervisors

Sitting at the core of virtualization is a well-known but little-discussed technology called the Hypervisor. The hypervisor is a layer of software which enables single hardware to host multiple, isolated virtual machines. It also helps with the management of those virtual machines. But before we talk about how the hypervisor works, the types of hypervisors and the benefits of this technology, let’s put some basic definitions in place. We’ll start with a technology that is tied very closely to hypervisors – virtualization.

What is virtualization?  

Virtualization is the creation of a “virtual” form of a resource, such as a server, a desktop, an operating system, storage space, network or files. With virtualization, traditional computing is transformed, as these resources become scalable as per a client or organisation’s needs. Virtualization has been around for decades and is now split into three distinct types – Operating System (OS) virtualization, hardware virtualization and server virtualization.

Virtualization is used to consolidate workloads, systems and multiple operating environments on one single physical system. Essentially the underlying hardware is partitioned, and each partition runs as a separate, isolated Virtual Machine – which has its own Operating System. Now, this is where the hypervisor comes in.

What is a hypervisor?

The function of partitioning, or more specifically, abstracting and isolating these different OS and applications from the underlying computer hardware is what the hypervisor does. Therefore, it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that virtualization is enabled by the functions of the hypervisor.

What this means is that the underlying hardware (which is known as the host machine) can independently operate and run one or more virtual machines (known as guest machines). The hypervisor also helps manage these independent Virtual Machines by distributing hardware resources such as memory allotment, CPU usage network bandwidth and more amongst them. It does this by creating pools of abstracted hardware resources, which it then allocates to Virtual Machines. It also can stop and start virtual machines, when requested by the user.

Another key component of hypervisors is ensuring that all the Virtual Machines stay isolated from others – so when a problem occurs in one Virtual Machine, the others remain unaffected. Finally, the hypervisor also handles the communication amongst Virtual Machines over virtual networks – enabling VMs to connect with one another.

How does a hypervisor work?

To understand how hypervisors work, it’s important to understand – what are the types of hypervisors? How do they work? What is the difference?

There are 2 types of Hypervisors. They’re also referred to as Native or Bare Metal Hypervisors (Type 1) and Hosted Hypervisors (Type 2).

Type 1 Hypervisors:

Type 1 hypervisors run on the host machine’s hardware directly, without the intervention of an underlying Operating System. This means that the hypervisor has direct hardware access without contending with the Operating System and drivers.

Type 1 is widely acknowledged as the best-performing and most efficient hypervisors for enterprise computing. The ability to directly assign resources makes these hypervisors more scalable, but the advantages go further than that:

  1. Optimisation of Physical Resources: Organisations often burn funds quickly by buying separate servers for different applications – an endeavour that is time-consuming and takes up data centre space. With Type 1 hypervisors, IT can utilize server hardware, which frees up data centre costs and real estate and cuts down on energy usage.
  2. Greater Resource Allocation: Most Type 1 hypervisors give admins the opportunity to manually set resource allocation, based on the application’s priority. Many Type 1 hypervisors also automate resource allocation as required, allowing resource management to be a dynamic and customised option.  

The best-known examples of Type 1 hypervisors are VMware’s ESXi and Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

Type 2 Hypervisors

Typically, these hypervisors are built on top of the Operating System. Because of its reliance on the host machine’s underlying Operating System (in direct contrast to Type 1), it is referred to as “hosted hypervisor”. The hypervisor runs as an application within the Operating System, which then runs directly on the host computer. Type 2 hypervisors do support multiple guest machines but are not allowed to directly access the host hardware and its resources. The pre-existing Operating System manages the calls to the CPU for memory, network resources and storage. All of this can create a certain amount of latency.

However, this is only the case for more complex and high-performance scenarios. Type 2 hypervisors are still popular home and test labs.  Furthermore, Type 2 hypervisors come with their own set of benefits, like:

  1. Type 2 Hypervisors are much easier to set up and to manage as you already have an Operating System to work with.
  2. It does not require a dedicated admin.
  3. It is compatible with a wide range of hardware.

Examples of type-2 hypervisors include Oracle Solaris Zones, Oracle VM Server for x86, Oracle VM Virtual Box, VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion and more.  

KVM

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) a popular and unique hypervisor – seeing as it has characteristics of both Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors. This open sourced virtualization technology is built into Linux, and more specifically turns Linux into a hypervisor.

To be clear, KVM is a part of the Linux code, which means it benefits from every Linux innovation or advancement, features and fixes without additional engineering.

VM converts Linux into a Type-1 (native/bare-metal) hypervisor. It is a secure option, that gives you plenty of storage, hardware support, memory management, live migration of your VM (without any service interruption), scalability, scheduling and resource control, low latency and greater prioritization of apps. KVM also creates more secure and better isolated Virtual Machines, while ensuring that they continue to run at peak performance. Excited to use all of these features? Well, when you sign up for a Linux VPS Hosting plan with us, KVM will automatically become a part of the packages you create. Check out our array web hosting packages, here.

Protecting Your Business From Increasingly Sophisticated Cyberattacks

Whether you’re leading a Fortune 500 company or your own small business, cybersecurity must be a fundamental business objective. Several high-profile cyberattacks in the first half of 2017 have affected organizations of all sizes all over the world, and these attacks are only going to become more common and more sophisticated.

As a business leader, it’s important to understand that the threat is constant. Even if you’ve never experienced an attack, your servers are perpetually being scanned by hackers for vulnerabilities — and the damage can be fatal to your business. A cyberattack can result in the loss of critical information, putting the reputation of your brand at stake.

If you suffer a cyberattack and are able to react quickly, it’s certainly possible to mitigate the damage to your business and your customers, though containing an attack can get tremendously expensive. If you have a plan in place, however, you can save yourself a lot of time and money — and protect the future of your business.

Diagnosing the Threat

There are countless types of cyberattacks, including malware, phishing, rogue software, and many others. But over the past couple of years, hackers have increasingly favored distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks when targeting businesses.

There are essentially three types of DDoS attacks.

A volume-based attack overloads servers with data, rendering the victim’s website inaccessible. This is the type of attack that generally makes the news, as roughly 90 percent of DDoS attacks are volume-based. The other 10 percent are split between protocol attacks, which drain your servers’ resources by overloading them with requests, and application-layer attacks, which perform specific requests to extract important information from your servers, such as credit card details or user logins.

Good Bots vs. Bad Bots

The key characteristic of DDoS attacks is the use of bots to do the dirty work, and bots are everywhere. In fact, if you analyze a typical website, you’ll find that around 61 percent of traffic is actually nonhuman and attributed to bots.

A bot is usually a software program that runs simple and repetitive automated tasks over the internet. Google’s crawler is perhaps the most famous example. The crawler scours websites, analyzing text, titles, page speed, inbound links, and other factors to determine the ranking of the site. This is typically a good thing — as a publisher, you want the Google crawler to get on your page and rank you as highly as possible.

Likewise, communication on many websites — including news platforms, reservation sites, and shopping sites — is often conducted through chatbots. These bots allow companies to cut costs and better serve their customers.

But bots can also be used to cause harm.

During a DDoS attack, a bot herder usually controls huge botnets, or robot networks, via a control server and manipulates them into behaving a certain way to extract as much valuable information as possible from a targeted website. This is the same mechanism behind a remote file inclusion (RFI) attack or cross-site scripting (XSS) attack.

Attacks in Action

Hackers are getting more creative when it comes to cyberattacks, and the threats are becoming more serious — and expensive. For example,in 2016, U.K.-based betting company William Hill had its website knocked offline as a result of a DDoS attack. Fortunately, the attack didn’t occur during a major sporting event, but it could have cost the company an estimated £4.4 million.

Ransomware is another type of cyberattack that is becoming more common, and hackers are becoming more original. For instance, the Romantik Seehotel Jägerwirt, a hotel in Austria, was ransomed early in 2017. But rather than simply take control of the hotel’s website and demand money, the hackers took it a step further by locking guests out of their rooms and shutting down the hotel’s reservation system.

Some types of cyberattacks are more sinister in that they do more than simply knock a company’s website offline or demand money. In 2015, for example, PokerStars was hacked by a bot that gave certain players an unfair advantage and helped them win a combined $1.5 million. Because poker isn’t a completely randomized game and you can win with the right calculations, bots and artificial intelligence tactics are becoming a more common problem within the industry.

And no industry is immune to hackers — sometimes, the attacks may even come from competitors. Here at UnifyHOST we once saw a unique attack on an airline website that looked like a simple seat reservation. But as we analyzed the request, we noticed that it went through the entire reservation process of choosing a carrier, departure time, destination, and price, but then it immediately stopped once it was time to pay.

We then realized that the request was carried out by a bot, and the intent was to show the flight as being completely booked. That way, when real customers visited the site to make a reservation and saw that there were no open seats, they’d go to a competitor — which is exactly what the hacker wanted.

Albert Einstein once said, “Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.” The same theory holds true with cybersecurity. Because cyberattacks are a growing problem across all industries, nobody is immune to threats. You can resolve them once they happen (after they’ve already cost your company a lot of money and, more importantly, potentially harmed your brand reputation), or you can create a cybersecurity plan to ensure they never happen in the first place.

3 Ways to Prevent Bot Attacks on Your Web Applications

It’s becoming more common to hear about IoT security – or the lack thereof – in the news, and computers and IoT devices are frequently targeted by hackers for “bot” employment to perform distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, application exploits and credential stuffing.

Non human traffic or bot traffic represents currently more than 60% of the total traffic going to web sites.

Those bots come in a variety of forms, making it extremely important to distinguish between the infected hosts that often make up botnets to perform various malicious activities, to the legitimate bots that are extremely important in driving customer traffic to your site (Googlebot, for example).

Different Types of Bot Attacks on Web Services

Websites that contain pricing information and proprietary information are especially vulnerable to bot traffic.

An example of a content scraping process can be seen when airline companies use bot farming to scrape price information from competitive airline company sites. They use this information to dynamically price similar products — once they find out what a competitor is charging, they can price their services lower to gain a market advantage.

A more malicious use includes deploying a botnet that seeks out vulnerabilities in website technology and stores this as a vulnerable site, ripe for exploitation.

Bots are a Growing Crisis

In the past, bot attacks weren’t nearly as sophisticated and powerful as they are now. During the mid-1990s, for example, the typical attack consisted of 150 requests per second. At the time, this was enough to bring down numerous systems. Now, due to the sheer size of modern botnets, the average attack generates over 7,000 requests per second.

Last year, we all witnessed many large scale attacks such as the DDoS attack against Oracle DYN, formerly Dyn DNS, which was hit with a flood of DNS queries from tens of millions of IP addresses at once. This was an attack executed by the Mirai botnet, which infected over 100,000 IoT devices and targeted tech giants like Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit and OVH.

Because bot attacks are becoming more common (and dangerous), it’s crucial that every IT professional take proactive measures to combat malicious bot activities. Here are a few tips that can help in the fight against bots:

1. Separate the Bad Bots From the Good Bots

Bots are often lumped together into one big group, but there are good bots and there are bad bots. The bad ones are likely to attack your website and cause harm, but the good ones — like Googlebot — help make the internet a safer, more efficient place.

For that reason, you can’t simply block all bots in hopes of avoiding an attack. Instead, you need to categorize and allow good bots, whilst limiting and managing the bad ones.

Commonly a captcha is used to address basic bot attacks. As this requires “human” interaction to process it is seen as a good starting point. However, captchas are also seen as an inconvenient blocker in a user’s site experience.

2. Take Advantage of the Latest Technology in Security

Traditional rate limiting and captcha is no longer enough on its own and many companies have introduced Javascript challenges to establish the legitimacy of the origin of the request.

Using behavioural analysis of incoming requests combined with device fingerprinting enables companies to distinguish between infected hosts, whilst acting transparently and not impacting the browsing experience.

Leaseweb distributed cloud security platforms can cope with large volumes of traffic, connections, further protecting yourself from bot attacks.

3. Utilize Artificial Intelligence

It’s only a matter of time before attackers learn more sophisticated manners to collect data and replicate real user behavior more accurately. For this reason, numerous companies are trying to employ machine learning models to detect patterns and anomalies.

Leaseweb use models that work to inspect data at a rate not humanly possible, while simultaneously developing more sophisticated models to combat the endlessly changing bot technologies.

As a conclusion, our advice is that companies need to take proactive steps to actively stop malicious bots without compromising the availability of their web assets. Leveraging behavioral controls rather than static rules is far more effective as we work to control the rise of the bots.

3 Ways to Safeguard Your Company From a Ransomware Attack

Ransomware attacks have been around for decades, and they continue to wreak havoc on systems around the world.

However, gone are the days when biologists spread the ransomware attack PC Cyborg through floppy disks to innocent victims. Attacks have gotten bigger and more dangerous; we are now all too familiar with attacks like Osiris, CryptoLocker, and WannaCry, which collectively infected hundreds of thousands of computers in over 100 countries, costing millions of dollars in damage.

Ransomware attacks continue to be an issue due to the continual development of new techniques for infecting systems. We have seen a major increase in occurrences over the last few years, resulting in the constant development of techniques used to safeguard systems against these intrusive attacks.

How Ransomware Works

This type of malware is extremely frustrating to deal with, given its intrusive and hostile nature. This software runs illegally on systems to block users from accessing their data until they pay a ransom to the hacker.

This type of illegal threat to data often presents itself through a type of Trojan that exploits security loopholes in web browsers. Ransomware is typically embedded in plug-ins or email attachments that can spread quickly throughout a system once it is inside.

In order to combat this devastating situation, IT experts recommend that companies develop and implement solid ransomware protection strategies. Strategies should aim to prevent data loss resulting from Trojans like CryptoLocker and others under development.

Although several IT security professionals believe companies can enable ransomware protection by using network shares, ransomware is quickly being developed to access network shares, exploiting vulnerabilities in these systems to access information.

How to Protect Your Company from Ransomware Attacks

There may be instances where criminals attempt to attack the backup software itself. That’s why it’s important to develop a robust self-defense mechanism for backing up your file contents and preventing criminals from disrupting system applications. Some steps you can take to protect your data are:

1. Back Up Your Data with the Cloud

It is crucial for companies to routinely back up their locally stored data in order to prevent loss in the case of an attack. Traditional methods of backing up data consume many storage resources, which can negatively impact a computer’s performance.

Backing up your data is now easier due to the reliability and resiliency of cloud storage. Cloud technology streamlines the backup process, giving you the ability to back up your information frequently and easily.

2. Implement Virus Protection Programs

Active Protection programs work several ways to prevent unauthorized activity on your computers. First, they are designed to monitor the Master Boot Record in Windows-based systems. These programs prevent any changes from being made within the system, which would otherwise prevent you from being able to properly boot up your computer.

Many ransomware programs copy files and place them in AppData and LocalAppData folders while masking themselves as standard processes within Windows. To combat this, these programs prevent applications within these folders from being launched.

Additionally, it’s crucial for you to keep your operating system and applications updated. Many ransomware programs are designed to exploit software vulnerabilities, which can be closed by installing patches and updates.

3. Stay Secure With Cloud Storage

Clouds are typically just as safe and secure as private servers, and they are equipped with elaborate access control and encryption technology that can be expanded to meet all of your storage needs. In addition to protecting your data against ransomware attacks, clouds also contain security to protect your files and information against DDoS attacks.

Despite minor shortcomings in cloud storage, they’re great at protecting businesses from ransomware attacks. Clouds present scalability that allows users to keep up with constant development of malware technology. Although the nature of an attack is unlikely to change, the delivery methods used will continue to develop, and cloud services will be there to adjust quickly and provide constant protection.

Is it worth investing in Disaster Recovery?

Investing upfront in the mitigation of potential disasters will save your company and network in the long run. In the world of reliable hosting, for example, each infrastructure deployment includes all kinds of high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions. Investing in HA and DR solutions upfront will enable business continuity, avoid a lot of stress, and save you from the potentially devastating recovery costs.

What is disaster recovery?

According to TechTarget, “disaster recovery is an area of security planning that aims to protect an organization from the effects of significant negative events. DR allows an organization to maintain or quickly resume mission-critical functions following a disaster.”

This means that implementing DR requires a different approach for every organization, as each organization has its own mission-critical functions. Typically, some mission-critical functions run on or rely on IT infrastructure. Therefore, it is good to look at DR within the context of this (hosted) infrastructure; however, it should be part of business continuity planning as a whole.

Important questions to ask when you plan and design your mission-critical hosting infrastructure include:

  • How much time am I prepared to have my mission-critical functions unavailable (RTO)?
  • How much data am I prepared to lose, i.e. the time duration for which you will not be able to recover your data (RPO). For example, if you safely backup your data once a day, you can lose up to one day of data when a disaster happens.
  • How much money will it cost the organization (per hour) when the mission-critical services are not available? DR measures include prevention, detection and correction.

Disaster recovery for common failures

Most hosting services include disaster recovery for most common failures such as failure of a physical disk, server, network switch, network uplink connection, or power feed. This is referred to as High Availability (HA).

A redundant setup solves failures as if an element fails, another infrastructure piece takes over. Redundant networking devices and cabling, multiple power feeds, seamless failover to battery power, and separate power generators that can run forever play an important role in keeping IT infrastructure and thus your software services up and running. Also in case of a fire in a data center, the fire is typically detected early and extinguished through gas (reduction of oxygen), without even affecting most equipment in the same data center hall. This means that most ‘disasters’ are being recovered without impacting the availability of the infrastructure services.

One of the most commonly used tools in DR is creating a frequent backup of your data. If a disaster occurs, you can then restore your backup and relaunch your mission-critical functions and other services.

For faster relaunch of your services after a disaster, replication of your application servers and data can come in handy, as it is readily available to relaunch, compared to backups that would first need to be restored (which takes more time).

Preparing for critical disasters

To mitigate risks of larger disasters which are much less likely to happen, an alternative IT infrastructure environment to run your mission-critical functions can help to enable your business continuity.

Some choose to backup critical data to another location. Others replicate application servers and data to another location, with available hosting infrastructure, to be able to relaunch application services quickly or to have a seamless failover without service interruption.

In case you need to mitigate the risk of failure of the entire environment, the common solution is to include a failover data center site in your IT infrastructure setup. Disaster recovery by means of adding an alternative data center (also called Twin DC setup) also requires a tailored approach to identify the right setup for your applications and mission-critical functions.

Another important facet is to implement applications that can deal with infrastructure failures. Where in the past it was more common to trust on the underlying infrastructure for high availability, it has become more popular to implement applications in such a way that underlying (cheaper) infrastructure may (and will) fail, without impacting the availability of the mission-critical functions.

This means finding a balance between investing in more reliable hosting infrastructure, applications that deal with failures in the underlying infrastructure, and planning and preparing failover to an alternative infrastructure environment.

Making optimal use of DR investments

To make optimal use of DR investments you can choose to use the extra resources in a second datacenter even when there is no failover due to a large disaster in the primary data center location. You can spread workloads between both data centers, for example with half of the workloads running in each data center A. During a disaster, non-mission-critical services can be stopped to make space for mission-critical services to failover.

Another example is when all applications run in the primary data center, and only those applications and data related to the mission-critical functions are replicated and fail over to a second data center in case of disaster (active-passive).

The main takeaways

As every business is different when carrying out business continuity planning every organization should have their own approach to disaster recovery. The challenge for these organizations is going to be balancing the tools and methods available. The goal, however, should be clear for everyone – invest upfront to prevent higher recovery costs in case of a disaster.

E-commerce: Your website and infrastructure can make or break your business

Running an E-commerce business is a daunting task, and trying to ensure its success is even more difficult due to the highly competitive world of digital marketing. Companies are tasked with determining what strategies will work best for their businesses and then need to be able to adapt to overcome various challenges to become successful. 

The importance of scaling 

To thrive as an E-commerce business, it is imperative to master the ability to increase traffic to your website. Successfully incorporating proper scaling into your e-commerce shop is a challenge many online store owners are unable to implement adequately. Having the ability to do so helps your store maintain loyal customers and acquire more new customers than the competition.    

Your website needs to be able to scale up to handle spikes in traffic which occur around busy shopping periods. The revenue from Black Friday 2018 was an astounding $6.2 billion, a 23.6% increase year over year. The revenue made from this day alone is a significant contributor to whether an E-commerce business has had a successful quarter or not – so you don’t want to miss out on any opportunities. It is important to make sure your website is functioning properly on these promotional occasions as there might be a lot of new website visitors who are having their first encounters with your brand, so you’ll want to make a good impression. Most website visitors will be looking to take advantage of the available promotions, so you’ll want to make sure this transactional process is as smooth as possible. I remember an occasion when I was shopping online, and I wasn’t able to complete a purchase because the systems were too busy. This resulted in me getting the item elsewhere, and driving a customer to a competitor is exactly what you don’t want as an e-commerce company.  

Visitor trust is important 

Establishing trust with online visitors is essential. Not everyone who visits your site will be set on making a purchase. Some users will be visiting for the first time and may be hesitant to make a purchase from an unfamiliar site. Establishing trust, even in tiny increments, is the key to keeping more customers at your site during the early stages of the buying cycle.   

A huge factor in gaining trust is having a system that works. If your customers leave due to busy systems or a slow-loading website, chances are those customers will not return, as they perceive you as an unreliable brand. A stable, well-performing e-commerce platform will give your customers a good experience, and they will happily return to purchase more. This means you need to support your website with infrastructure that performs well and can scale up to meet seasonal peak demands.  

One more trust factor is security. As an e-commerce company, your customers trust you with their personal and payment data. Making sure that data is kept safe is vital for your customers, employees, brand, and reputation in the industry. It pays to have measures in place to ensure your infrastructure is secure and monitored.   

Before you should ever consider a redesign for your site, it is important for you to analyze any potential defects in the existing conversion funnel. The lifeline of any e-commerce site can demonstrate what is causing a decrease in sales. You need to track down what is leading to the decline in sales and remedy the problem immediately in order to keep your business alive. There are several ways you can optimize your website to increase sales, and actually most of those have to do with the usability of your site, as well as the accessibility of your checkout and payment processes. If the shopping experience is tedious, your products are difficult to find, and paying for them is a hassle – your customers will go elsewhere.   

Four steps to a better customer experience  

  1. Begin by making sure your website runs properly

The website should load fast, allowing customers to view products and switch from product to product without any downtime. Long waits for pages to load often cause customers to abandon their carts to find websites that function better. Kissmetrics found that 40% of consumers abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.This means you need to ensure you run your website on infrastructure that can deliver the best possible latency, but can also bring the performance and scalability you need.  

  1. Ensure your website is easy to navigate

Visitors should be able to maneuver from product to product without any issues, and they should be able to locate what they are looking for easily. Customers need to have information easily accessible, as this will keep them happy and encourage them to buy more products and services from you.  

  1. Create a painless checkout process

Examine your existing checkout process. If you have a process that is overly complicated, requiring the customer to go through several steps just to place an order, chances are more customers will abandon carts instead of purchasing items they are interested in. Unexpected shipping costs, requiring customers to create accounts, security issues, and various other factors are leading culprits for abandoned carts. One often-forgotten aspect of the checkout process is the integration of your payment provider. If you have good connectivity, your checkout and payment processes will most probably run smoother, giving your customers a better experience. 

  1. Make security a top priority

If visitors do not feel safe using your website, they will not feel confident in providing their credit card or personal information to you in order to make a purchase. Make sure you choose a trusted hosting partner for your site. 

Trust and usability are key  

If you have an E-commerce aspect of your business, you need a quick and easy shopping and checkout process, and a dependable system supporting everything. Choosing the right type of infrastructure, supported with a set of services that keep things safe and speedy, can make a huge difference in the success of your e-commerce business. 

How to create a 3-2-1 backup system

Remind me, what is 3-2-1 backup? 

The 3-2-1 backup rule means that you should have 3 independent copies of your data – 2 of which are stored on-site for fast restore and 1 is stored off-site for recovery after a site disaster. There are many different ways to create this system, particularly when looking at the on-site options. It’s also worth noting that distinction between replica ‘ready-to-run’ copies and more traditional backup copies is becoming less and less clear, and the terms backup and replication are often used interchangeably. 

Backup vs. replication 

The onsite copy of your data can be a backup copy or a replica of the server you are protecting. The difference between backup and replication is that backup refers to copying files (or data blocks) to some external media, while replication is the creation and synchronization of an exact copy of the server in the native server format. 

A replica is ideal for direct spin-up, while a backup copy usually requires a restore process before it can spin-up. A major benefit of having a backup copy is it typically contains multiple restore points in time. You can go back to the state of the data one week ago or one month ago, for example. 

Designing your 3-2-1 backup combination 

At Leaseweb, there are a number of ready-to-use products which can be used to create a 3-2-1 backup of your server and data. See some examples combinations below.

IaaS Onsite original data Onsite copy Offsite copy 
Virtual Server Virtual Server  Acronis Cloud Backup 
Dedicated Server Dedicated Server other Dedicated Server Acronis Cloud Backup 
Private Cloud Apache Cloudstack Private Cloud Instance  Acronis Cloud Backup 
Private Cloud VMware vCloud Private Cloud VM Veeam Backup Acronis Cloud Backup 
Private Cloud VMware vSphere (single tenant) Private Cloud VM Veeam Backup Acronis Cloud Backup 
On-site storage 

For the original data storage, the infrastructure services are already equipped with redundant storage platforms that have high availability features. Dedicated Servers are typically ordered and delivered with multiple disks in a redundant RAID5/6 setup to protect against disk failure (failed disk hardware replacement included). 

For storing an onsite copy, a Dedicated Server can easily be setup with Private Networking to connect with a Dedicated ‘Backup Storage’ Server. You can choose any available OS feature (or run a software application of your choice) to manage the replication of the data. Examples are Linux DRBD (automatically replicates all data) and Linux rsync (manual file-based replication). For Leaseweb VMware platforms only, Leaseweb offers Veeam Backup which currently functions as a solution for onsite backup. This service does not require a software agent and comes with a self-service management portal. 

Off-site storage 

The offsite backup protects against a complete site disaster. Some backup providers give the option to test (or even run) the off-site backup copy directly within the offsite cloud environment, without the need to restore first to your onsite server infrastructure. 

The offsite copy solution is offered as an add-on self-service. This service is powered by the Acronis Cloud Backup software agent and a self-service management portal. 

Note, for advanced setups, some enterprise customers enable both fast restore and site disaster recovery in one through a twin data center setup, whereby an offsite/twin data center replica enables both fast restore and site disaster recovery. 

Wrapping up 

As you can see from the table above there are various ways to design a 3-2-1 backup using Dedicated Servers and Cloud services. Some companies employ an even more expansive backup strategy, using more than one off-site backup partner to create a 3-2-2 setup for example. There is no such thing as a perfect backup system but diversifying and having different options is only going to improve your chances of a smooth recovery from a disaster.