The Importance of Website Security Certificate For Your Business
Date: 1/11/2020

If you are a regular browser, you would have noticed a padlock symbol in the address bar. This symbol essentially indicates that any information passing between your web browser and the server is encrypted. In other words, this information is secure and snoop-proof.

As a business, this symbol or website security certificate will indicate to customers that your website is secure against hackers or any other snooping tool and that your business website is secured via an encrypted connection.

Two Main Reasons Why Website Security Certificates are Important

A website security certificate which is issued by a certificate authority (CA), is also known as an SSL certificate, an SSL server certificate, or an HTTPS certificate.

Anytime your consumer(s) or a web user views a website security certificate in the address bar, it relays two things:

• First, that they are securely connected to an authentic or official server for the website, as opposed to a fake website.
• Second, all their data and information is secure and cannot be intercepted by hackers.

Identity Theft and Data Leak Concerns amid Rising Cyber Security Threat

A crucial aspect of setting up and running a business website is to ensure that your website is secure – both for your customers and for your business website as well. One of the reasons you need to focus heavily on website security has to do with the increase in cybercrime rates. Keep in mind that cybercrime and identity theft are a threat to customers and businesses alike. Here’s an interesting, albeit alarming stat – in January of 2019 alone, there were more than more than 1.76 billion data leaks.

What’s equally alarming is the fact that 7 out of 10 businesses are underprepared or seriously vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

Given these risks and threats from cyber criminals, it is imperative that businesses do more to secure their business and consumers. A website security certificate is a big step in that direction.

How does a Website Security Certificate Function?

Now that you know why your business needs to have a website security certificate, let us take a look at the working process of a website security certificate.

In simple terms, your website security certificate works by establishing or asserting the identity of your business or organization. The certificate also allows you to and mutually validate or authenticate your customers and your web server and helps in establishing a secure and encrypted connection between the two via a TLS handshake.

Three basic things happen during a TLS handshake.

• A number of cipher suites and parameters are exchanged during the process to establish common cryptographic features supported by both parties.
• Either one or both parties involved in the exchange will be authenticated.
• Specific keys will be exchanged while symmetric session keys will be generated.

Once this authentication process or the TLS handshake is complete, a secure connection is established using which, users can easily transmit their data or information to the concerned website without the fear of their data being compromised.

A Cyber War Exists

If you are a business with an online presence, then securing your website via a website security certificate is critical – and this is true regardless of whether or not you collect any kind of personal information of users. Securing data integrity and privacy has to happen on a war footing if we want to limit or minimize the risks posed by cyber criminals and hackers.