How BlackMesh Helps CMS Product Owners Keep Things Secure and Compliant
Open source content management systems like Drupal, Magento and WordPress are popular options for companies today because they make it easier for IT and development teams to integrate various emerging technologies—like workflow automation tools, Kubernetes and public cloud environments—into their web applications. These open source platforms integrate new capabilities that improve the digital experience for end users or add efficiencies to internal workflows.
However, with open source comes added complexity—and added risk. As a website or web application becomes more technically advanced, so too do its potential security and non-compliance threats. Over the past decade, this unfortunate correlation has been reiterated by cyberattacks on companies like Equifax, Adobe and Yahoo—all of which lost money, customers, and reputational integrity in the aftermath. Therefore, CMS product owners today are faced with a difficult and costly challenge: developing innovative and complex digital experiences that are equally secure and compliant.
With a partner like BlackMesh, they can have both. The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution can effectively maintain complex web applications built on open source CMS platforms, providing the tools necessary to uphold extensive and effective security, monitoring and compliance standards.
Taking A Proactive Approach to Security
The best security is proactive prevention, and that’s what BlackMesh and its security features are designed to do. BlackMesh creates and implements active, preemptive processes for protecting or detecting malicious activity before it occurs.
BlackMesh’s security proficiencies aim to protect companies and their websites from growing risks. BlackMesh helps customers keep up with the latest security updates from open source CMSs to ensure that any in-use modules aren’t running on outdated versions with potential security gaps. BlackMesh can also perform security patches and run updates on any in-use middleware software, as well as the CMS’s underlying operating system (OS). So if there’s a security gap in a user’s Drupal platform, BlackMesh will patch the OS to solve and protect against that Drupal security problem.
What’s more, BlackMesh will independently monitor a user’s systems constantly, running updates on modules or scanning servers to find and address security gaps, without the user ever realizing it.
As a result, CMS product owners can feel confident in the maintained security of their platforms and focus on other, more strategic endeavors.
Mitigating Damages When A Security Breach Occurs
As the frequency and risks posed by cyberattacks continue to worsen, it’s no longer a question of if companies will endure a security breach, but when. Therefore, it’s important that companies invest heavily in both proactive and reactive security solutions—but few business leaders actually feel like they are doing enough. According to a new study from IDG, nearly 80% of senior IT and IT security leaders believe their organizations lack sufficient protection against cyberattacks despite increased IT security investments made in 2020 to deal with distributed IT and work-from-home challenges.
With a support partner like BlackMesh, however, IT and business leaders gain some peace of mind. BlackMesh can help outfit a CMS platform with solutions that ensure teams become aware of hacks or security breaches as soon as they happen. For example, the PaaS solution offers malware, denial-of-service, and virus protection software that identifies when an attack occurs through regular scans of a CMS. The software will look for any indicators of virus or malware-like activity and, if abnormal activity is detected, alert the system operators immediately.
From there, BlackMesh’s log monitoring features can help identify the motive behind the attack. The tool continuously records all information flowing into and out of the site (even the items within an external site, like Apache), noting every change made to a file and the reason behind it—like whether or not it was intentional or accidental. This information is crucial during a security breach because it determines whether or not customer data was harmed and how much data was affected.
However, most CMS platforms don’t offer log monitoring as an out-of-the-box feature. For some users, this makes installing these tools difficult. With BlackMesh, users can configure log monitoring tools into their applications with ease. BlackMesh also steps in to help repair an application if and when an attack does occur. Whether it’s possible to salvage the site or it needs to be rebuilt from scratch, the software can help establish all security and compliance standards around a site or application—and, because BlackMesh is a platform-as-a-service, they can do so without ever actually touching it.
A Holistic Approach to Compliance
For enterprises in the healthcare, financial services, education and public sectors, security is both a concern and a requirement. Companies and agencies in these industries have to make sure that the security protections on their websites and any other digital platform comply with certain regulations. Otherwise, they may face harsh financial penalties.
But with the rise of data privacy legislation like GDPR and CCPA, companies from less-regulated industries are finding that, in order to attract different and new audiences, they have to meet certain regulatory standards. Security compliance will soon have to be a priority for companies in all industries, especially since the adoption of new data privacy regulation is a trend expected to continue.
To ensure that a website or web application is meeting regulations at all times, companies need to redesign the architecture of their CMS platform for compliance. To help with this, BlackMesh presents a unique offering: The solution comes with numerous compliance frameworks for CMS product owners to choose from—like FedRAMP, FISMA, PCI, HIPAA, FERPA and GDPR—depending on their industry’s applicable regulations. Once in place, these frameworks ensure the compliance of a site or application before and after it’s deployed.
BlackMesh’s log monitoring capabilities help guarantee a website or application’s compliance in the long-term. Through regular scans, the feature will document the presence of non-compliant files and alert product owners of this inconsistency and its source.
BlackMesh can also run routine software audits and secure data backups to confirm that any ongoing updates or changes will not affect a site’s regulatory compliance. This is especially important in certain industries, like healthcare or federal government entities. For instance, to meet HIPAA compliance, hospitals and other medical facilities have to store and handle their website data in a specific, highly secure manner. BlackMesh will use encrypted storage, transfer and disposal to ensure that all the website or patient data is secure and HIPAA compliant, and help product owners control access to patient health information by offering unique user IDs and passwords.
A Support Team That Works 24/7/365
Maintaining a secure and compliant CMS environment is not an easy task and can cost time, money and other resources. And given the growing threat of cyberattacks across industries, maintaining the integrity and safety of web environments is only getting more difficult.
But with a partner like BlackMesh, CMS product owners and their teams can keep up. With its proactive security features and holistic compliance frameworks, users have more control over their web environments. BlackMesh keeps CMS platforms up-to-date as well, ensuring that everything from simple modules to operating systems are running on the most recent security update. With BlackMesh, users gain a collaborator that can protect their CMS platforms against security and compliance concerns now and into the future.
To learn more about what BlackMesh can do for you, visit BlackMesh.com.