Security as a Foundation

• The primary principles of security are confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

• Information is possibly one of the most valuable assets most companies possess; losing it or caring for it negligently could spell disaster and possibly even ruin. The risks to confidentiality do not stop with access to data; credit card details are illegally obtained from Internet facing systems, then used or sold, with alarming frequency.

• We assume that the database system we are using will maintain the records of our sales correctly. We believe that our billing system is smart enough to add the items on a customer's bill. Without some form of integrity checking, neither of these situations may be true.

• Availability is the lifeblood of any business. In the e-commerce world, where every moment can directly translate to thousands of dollars in sales, even downtimes of less than an hour can do immense financial damage to a company.

• Security also entails a three-step process of assessment, revision, and implementation of changes. This continual process of evaluation and feedback is necessary to adapt processes and products to the ever-changing conditions of the online world, as hackers examine existing software and hardware systems and discover new vulnerabilities.

• Once you have successfully secured your environment and processes down to the level of your accepted risks, it is time to mitigate...