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The amount of traffic going back and forth over the Internet is increasing at a staggering rate; day by day, more and more people are doing more and more on the web, and as a result, more of a person’s information finds its way onto the Internet. It may be that the user of a website has to fill in their real name, or their date of birth, home town, anything … bit by bit, the information is being transferred; some of it is private or in some cases even highly confidential information. For the operators of a website, storing that information is a challenge of its own, but it’s only half the battle. First, one must get the customer to offer that information, and for them to have the peace of mind that in giving that information to someone, that the recipient of it will treat that data with the security that it rightly deserves. Of course, a visitor to a website has no idea how the data is stored by the website operator, they have to take that bit on trust that it is done correctly, but a huge step in demonstrating to a website visitor that a company is worthy of their trust is to establish their connection over an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) connection. In its simplest terms, an SSL certificate encrypts the data whilst in transmission between the user’s internet-connected device, and the website that they are interacting with. In doing so, an SSL certificate circumvents the possibility of a “man in the middle attack”, whereby a third party – almost always a nefarious one – tracks the data back and forth to and from a user’s device, or to and from a website, logs that data to a file then uses again in the future in ways that it was not originally intended. A good example would be a man in the middle trapping credit card information between the source and destination, then using that information to make other, unauthorized purchases. With an encrypted connection via an SSL certificate, it is not possible to decipher that data and use it in an unauthorized manner. SSL certificates are easy and relatively inexpensive to obtain; they are incredibly simple to install and take almost no time to obtain. For this small investment in effort, one can give their users the peace of mind that they increasingly require in today’s heavily data-dependent world. The all-important padlock shown on a user’s Internet browser application, and optionally, the green colorization of the address bar that come with the implementation of an SSL certificate are now being seen as absolute fundamentals by users before they will give a website any information at all, and are quite literally, becoming the difference between the success or failure of a website – one can spend thousands of dollars on SEO getting a user to a website, but for the sake of one hundred dollars, it could all be for nought if that user refuses to provide the information required for fear of no security. Author Bio: Michael Collins is a Manager at Expeed Technology. He is vastly experienced in ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Web Hosting, SQL Server, Azure. His company Expeed Technology is a provider of premium Australian web hosting services focusing on Microsoft technologies. They provide- web hosting, email hosting, virtual servers, hosted Exchange and hosted Share Point.
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