If you’re an avid online shopper, you may be familiar with SSL certificates. These are noted by the padlock that appears in your browser bar, particularly when you’re attempting to check out from your digital shopping cart. It’s a small icon, but one that packs a powerful punch. It lets you know that as the system intercepts your credit card data, it does so securely, encrypting the numbers so they’re not visible or obtainable to would-be hackers. Another way you can discern whether or not a site is running with an SSL certificate is if the URL prefix begins with https over http.
To date, the e-commerce connection is the most common association between SSL certificates and the consumer. Yet, business leaders should also be aware of the myriad benefits they can reap by incorporating them into their operations and processing. As the costs associated with implementing these certificates are normally minimal to non-existent, it only makes sense for forward-thinking executives to give them a second look, regardless of whether or not they’re in an e-commerce retail marketplace. Here are three reasons why.
1. They encrypt sensitive communications
Even if you aren’t dealing directly with consumers’ financial information, your organization likely transmits sensitive and/or confidential data daily. If you offer any kind of web-based service, you have emails and text messages that may contain such information.
Moreover, if you’re joining two networks together via a VPN connection or routing web traffic over an unsecured connection (e.g. FTP), you could be putting data at risk of interception without even realizing it. If you require more than one certificate across a domain, an SNI certificate can enable you to achieve this connectivity without the purchase of a dedicated IP address for each one. It’s important to learn more about this option before determining if it’s the route for you, though it can offer valuable cost-savings benefits in the long run, especially if you’re operating more than one domain name and want to protect the services provided on each.
To this end, SSL certificates can provide total, end-to-end encryption for these communications, ensuring that data is protected both at the sender’s end as well as the receiver’s. That provides a much-needed and appreciated level of confidentiality, ensuring all parties that as the data travels, it is not vulnerable to interception or misuse along the way.
2. It enables you to establish a chain of confidentiality
Your company uses myriad hardware and software systems to transmit data throughout departments. As such, there’s a complex web of solutions being used to host, move and store both in-house and external information. If there is a data threat or compromise somewhere within that chain, it could upset the entire process. By implementing SSL certificates at every touchpoint, you can create a chain of confidentiality that begins at the first layer and travels all the way up to the last, ensuring that the services you’re using are indeed from a trusted and secure provider.
This way, even if you can’t constantly monitor the security of each individual device, you’re protected by the security of the whole, as each device feeds into the other. Much in the way that an employee trusts in his manager and the manager trusts in the C-suite executive, establishing that confidence at the onset can help make the entire company run more smoothly. As an added benefit, taking the time to secure every level can also help you appear more trustworthy to outside customers. Experts reveal that customers want to do business with customers that have proven measures in place to protect their sensitive data, specifically their financial information. If you can prove that there are no holes in your process and that you’ve taken steps to protect every device, you’ll be that much closer to earning and retaining their business.
3. You can verify users and control data access
When it comes to protecting company data, one major step to have in place is user authentication. Put simply, this ensures that each person who accesses a device has the correct privileges and authority to do so. You can extend SSL certificates to individual user accounts, where that person can create a unique identifier for his or her device. This way, if an unauthorized person attempts to access it, he or she will be denied. Implemented as a part of your more overarching Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), this system is built on a pair of keys, one public and one private.
These two keys coordinate and allow seamless and secure data exchange. For instance, if someone creates a digital signature using his private key, if the recipient has the corresponding public key he can access and decode the message, authenticating that the person who sent it is truly who he says he is. This simple step can go a long way in helping business leaders interpret whether or not a message was tampered with or otherwise compromised.
While SSL certificates are most closely identified with e-commerce, it’s time to give them a second look. By encrypting data across myriad communication touchpoints, they help add an extra layer of security and confidence that any business can benefit from. Not only does this step make back-end processing more secure, but it also helps establish that sense of trust and assurance that customers crave and demand, regardless of industry type.
