As a business owner, you are probably faced with hundreds of decisions that must be made weekly. Diving headlong into a technical effort might be scary. Diving into a security and operations effort is something you likely don't know how to do.
That's where this book comes in. This book helps you fill in the blanks for often-overlooked operational and security aspects of your business that lead to security breaches, downtime, excessive financial costs, and more bad things that go bump in the night.
This book is written in a very straightforward manner, and is oriented toward the owners of small and medium-sized businesses. You won't need a degree in computer science to follow along. Rather, this book has been written for the average person who utilizes technology in his or her business.
Business owners are often misled when it comes to technical and security matters because of a lack of knowledge. This is a handbook of distilled knowledge. It's not meant to make you a technical expert. Rather this book has been geared toward business owners to help alleviate that lack of knowledge.
Within these pages, you will find a number of valuable lessons:
Choosing proper hosting for your business
Choosing the right CMS to use for your business
Recovering when a hacker attacks your site
Reading your log files to spot and prevent trouble
Writing a simple (but effective) plan for disasters
Learning how, why, and when to patch your websites
Hardening the web server against attack
Writing an effective information security policy
Discovering how to prevent problems before they start
This handbook is designed to help owners of small and medium-sized businesses run a more efficient IT group. It focuses on the more popular Content Management Systems (CMSs) in use today. These CMSs are all open source, meaning they are free to download, modify, and use. The dark side to open source applications is that clients often choose them for their low cost of implementation, but often fail to realize that “free” means freedom to change, modify, and use the code. “Free” does not mean free from vulnerabilities, hackers, or financial costs of support.
For the tactical aspects of your server and your CMS, you'll find this book to be packed with wisdom often reserved by specially trained technical staffers.
This book can help to keep your web-enabled business running smoothly and safely—free from cyber thugs or random disasters that could take out your website.