What Is Web Security and Why Is It Necessary?
The massive importance of the web, along with the increasing sophistication, frequency and impact of cyberattacks, has made robust web security an absolute necessity. Web security solutions detect, prevent and respond to threats that attack web applications, websites, servers, networks and data centers. It’s a comprehensive set of tools that protect a business from attacks on its online operations, which can result in the loss of data, damage to systems, breach of privacy and compliance violations.
What is the Definition of Web Security?
Web security solutions include technology, software and processes that prevent attackers from accessing sensitive information. It includes solutions that encrypt data sent over the internet, ensure that a website is legitimate and not a fake or malicious site, provide centralized management of all web-based security technologies, block uploads of sensitive information to personal filesharing accounts, sanitize downloadable files and more. Web security also entails training users to avoid clickable links and attachments in unsolicited emails, to use strong passwords and follow other best practices.
Robust Web Security Helps Protect Consumer Trust
By implementing web security measures, businesses can prevent hackers from exploiting websites and digital platforms to steal private data that leads to identity theft, fraudulent activities and other forms of cybercrime. This helps to preserve user trust, maintain a positive brand reputation and improve customer engagement.
What Are the Benefits of Investing in Web Security?
Web applications and digital platforms are the backbone of most business processes, enabling employees and customers to interact with companies and services from anywhere. However, the increased flexibility and speed of these solutions have also opened up a wider attack surface for bad actors. Attacks can range from simple breaches to sophisticated phishing and ransomware schemes. If a business doesn’t have robust web security in place, they can lose valuable data and resources to attackers, experience unplanned downtime, incur costly ransom payments or be fined by regulators for violating data privacy and cybersecurity legislation.
A robust web security solution will typically comprise of a number of different tools that work together to protect against specific types of attacks. These can include web application firewalls (WAF) to identify and filter malware, coding and design best practices such as input validation to reduce the risk of SQL injection and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, secure storage of user credentials and session management, and regular backup and disaster recovery plans.
Businesses should consider implementing a next-generation secure web gateway as part of their all-in-one security platform. Forcepoint ONE Secure Web Gateway uses machine learning to monitor and control interactions with websites and downloadable documents, providing fast performance without sacrificing security. It allows organizations to block access to sites based on category and risk, sanitize and render them in secure containers for zero-trust on endpoints, and automatically sanitizes any uploaded documents to personal filesharing accounts. In addition, it provides a unified security management platform that enables businesses to apply web-security policies in the cloud and on their edge devices.