How Page Content Monitoring Can Improve Your Site Security

Business owners can’t exactly spend all day checking in with their website to ensure that it is performing as it should. The good news is that there are all kinds of monitoring programs and services to do the heavy lifting for you.

What do these monitoring platforms provide? There are any number of things the average business might want to track. For example, site uptime is a major concern for many business owners who want to make sure unscheduled downtime isn’t preventing customers (and prospective customers) from accessing their content.

The right monitoring service can alert a business when its website is experiencing downtime or even extended loading delays, just for example. Monitoring software and services could also be used to track network activity, error messages, customer logins, traffic, shopping carts, links, email, and more, including the content on your website.

Pretty much anything you want to monitor when it comes to your website performance can be tracked using appropriate software or monitoring services. What you may not realize is that such measures can do double duty by increasing your security, as well.

How can monitoring services, and content monitoring in particular, bump up your security? Here are just a few ways in which choosing appropriate software or service providers can keep you apprised of potential problems with your website and increase security in the process.

Deal with Downtime

There are obvious reasons to avoid website downtime. Some amount of downtime is, of course, unavoidable. Eventually you’re going to have to perform maintenance and upgrades to your site, and your web host will have scheduled downtime, as well.

What you really want to avoid is unscheduled downtime that stops visitors from reaching your site. When this happens, you risk losing both loyal customers and new visitors.

However, you gain more than just a window into what your visitors are encountering on your website when you hire a service to monitor downtime. You could also discover hacking or other attacks that disable your site.

Monitoring services will send you notifications when your site is experiencing unexpected downtime, allowing you to fix the problem post haste. This might actually allow you to stop a hack in progress and protect your network and data from breach.

What if hacking activities don’t result in downtime, though? Suppose someone is tampering with your content? In this case, having content monitoring services in addition to uptime monitoring could help you to spot unusual activity and stop hackers before they cause too much damage.

Spot Unusual Network Use

Some monitoring and management services provide a variety of network solutions for your business, including options to perform backups and keep an eye on network usage. Some even provide added security for your network in the process.

Regardless, the information these monitoring services provide can help to keep your business and your data safe. Network monitoring can provide you with clues to a number of different potential security threats.

When you receive alerts from your monitoring service showing unusual activity on your network, it could be a clue that employees are using your resources inappropriately, potentially creating security risks in the process. Or it could indicate that your network is under attack or that a breach is already underway.

Receiving such notifications allows you the opportunity to curb potentially harmful behavior by employees and stop hackers in their tracks, especially if your monitoring service also provides management and security.

Unfortunately, some threats come from inside your organization. Here, too, content monitoring could serve security purposes by alerting you to suspicious activities such as malicious tampering with your website content by disgruntled current or former employees.

Identify Who is Accessing the Network

With appropriate monitoring and management software or services in place, you increase your ability to determine who is responsible for breaches. Whether an employee has inadvertently allowed access to your network by clicking a spammy link, visiting a dangerous website, or sharing a password or you’ve come under attack by industrious hackers, the right monitoring program can help to trace the source of the breach.

This information can be invaluable when it comes to finding those responsible and setting up better protections in the future. Strengthening network security starts with understanding weaknesses, which monitoring methods can make you aware of.

Before you can address a problem you must first realize that something is wrong. Whether your network usage is high, your site is experiencing unscheduled downtime, or something hinky is happening with your content, the right monitoring software can alert you that there is a problem.

Derail Suspicious Email Usage

In addition to monitoring your website and your network usage, you should also keep tabs on email and messaging. For example, monitoring email could alert you to the transfer of confidential data or unusually large files, signaling inappropriate activity that goes against your security protocols.

You can also analyze log files after the fact to check for threats like viruses, quarantining as needed and tracking the sources of these threats. Regardless of the monitoring software or services you choose, you should know that you not only stand to gain valuable insight into and control over digital operations, but you could also increase security in the process.