With more and more businesses increasing their online presence, the vulnerability to threats like phishing, cyber snooping and data theft have also increased manifolds. The growing popularity of SaaS and e-commerce has also made it critical for organizations to ramp up their existing security infrastructure. Enterprises that run high volumes of business-critical applications over the Web also have to ensure much higher levels of online security. They need to consider increasing their level of protection with security technologies like SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) that can be implemented into browsers and web servers.
Enterprises can rely on SSL for secure delivery of services and solutions to customers and partners over the internet. SSL guards and communicates confidential data present between the web server and browser by encrypting it across public networks to achieve a high level of confidentiality. Data encryption has today become an essential way to protect users and data. Organizations with a significant web presence need an encryption system which will transfer sensitive information across the internet in a way that only intended recipients can view it.
There is a growing trend towards broader, more ubiquitous use of SSL and demand for more robust solutions that minimize exposure to vulnerabilities such as the recent Heartbleed bug. A higher level of security for the online environment can be achieved by using SSL certificate that protects passwords and user names, and prevents threats from hackers and thieves. SSL uses digital certificates to validate the uniqueness of a website or portal and prevents websites from phishing attacks as it does not allow hackers to enter websites.
For an IT company to establish a secure connection, SSL session has to decide on few factors present between server and untrusted site of the Internet. The link usage can be increased upto to 4-7 times while upgrading the bit keys to 2048 bit.
How to Ramp Up Security with SSL
To secure your web server one need to look up to SSL, as it prevents warning messages that pop up on your website when users visit, thus ensuring secure connection.
Organizations need to implement high-speed SSL decryption technology to help decrypt and inspect SSL traffic without degrading network performance. For online businesses, login encryption is no longer sufficient as security and malicious program pose a security threat and attacks.
With the use of traditional SSL encryption, the web server performance tends to get dropped. However, the 2048-bit certificate standard assures uninterrupted performance and security for organization. While many organizations continue to use the 1024-bit SSL standard, the new 2048-bit SSL standard is five times more compute intensive and can directly impact application performance.
Cloud applications increasingly use SSL to secure applications without affecting performance. Higher levels of SSL can be used to prevent customers and users from security attacks. The online portal can use SSL encryption for every user accessed page. At the same time security tools are used to detect the problems faced by online web services.
Strategies for Success Using SSL
Using good technical tools with best security measures will help and enhance the organization to deal with cyber-attacks. Implement strategies that can protect your enterprise from increasing trust-based attacks because cybercriminals are targeting unsecured SSL certificates for malicious use. One way would be centralizing the certificates and offloading the SSL tasks to an Application Delivery Controller (ADC) can significantly lessen human operational errors and operational cost for time spent managing certificates. However, the ADC must have appropriate capacity to manage high-volume traffic peaks. The processing of SSL handshake is offloaded by SSL accelerator, leaving server software to process a smaller amount of intense symmetric cryptography of the data exchange. SSL acceleration integrated with high-performance ADCs is capable of handling far more volumes of transactions than a general purpose server.
Enterprise must be sure to create a secure environment by having secure hypertext transfer protocol (S-HTTP), which ensures that hacker will not be able to retrieve the data even after it has access to it. This guarantees secure data transfer with the use of an SSL certificate. This type of protection measure provides encryption for sensitive information of users, effectively preventing it from falling into the wrong hands. ADC industry provides performance from entry-level to high-end appliances. SSL offload and acceleration removes all the bottlenecks including concurrent users, bulk throughput and new transactions per second along with supporting certificates up to 4096-bits for secure, wire-speed processing.
The data encryption and offload SSL session set-up to an ADC will be enhanced for 2048-bit SSL processing. SSL acceleration is integrated by high-performance ADCs that is capable of handling far more SSL TPS than a general purpose server. Application responses and client request are written from HTTP to SSL-secured HTTPS. Advanced ADCs automatically forcing the entire application to be SSL protected.
SSL providers need to offer IT environments with end-to-end encryption at multiple levels. With the transition of 1024-bit to 2048-bit, SSL will see an exponential growth in protection. The 2048-bit keys are more powerful for SSL processing and are 10 to 30 greater than 1024 bit keys. To maintain security and application performance, enterprises must upgrade their SSL infrastructure, particularly their ADCs.
Application delivery controllers are an essential part of the network, as they will ensure the applications availability and assures protection from threats with best peak performance. ADCs are solving more threat challenges than ever before as traditional security solutions can attempt and bring together products such as network firewalls, DDoS appliances, DNS appliances, web application firewalls. This product not only increases complexity, but also contributes to network latency and adds multiple points of failure. The ADC and firewalls can protect against large-scale cyber-attacks.
SSL encryption is penetrating in today’s enterprises and in next years it is expected to grow rapidly. Protecting customer information and intellectual property, SSL does it all. Organizations must effectively address the above strategy to reduce risk and avoid breaching of customer information, intellectual property theft, reputation damage and malware. With SSL certificates enterprises can achieve enhanced threat detection and eliminate cyber-attacks from unauthorized users.
By Shibu Paul ,Regional Sales Director – India, ME and SEA, Array Networks