Employees using the Internet for work is hardly anything new. From sales professionals revising work emails inside airplanes to healthcare workers using the Internet for communicating with patients – most professionals have depended on the Internet for the last two decades. However, the sudden and unexpected upsurge in the number of “remote workers” because of the COVID19 pandemic is ramping up Internet use for work at a staggering rate.
- Overall, remote workers have transitioned into the “new normal” quite successfully. Pew Research Center’s US remote work survey of 2021 shows that 71% of employees and 83% of employers found remote work extremely satisfactory.
- With only 6% of each group stating that remote working was troublesome, hybrid approaches to workplace planning, possibly with higher percentages of remote work, are realities that many business leaders are happy to embrace in the long run.
- However, with so many employees executing work-related duties directly on their laptops using potentially unsafe networks, there’s also a brewing discussion amongst business leaders about the need for more security and visibility.
- There has already been a drastic rise in online security issues during the pandemic. The INTERPOL and its private sector partners recently reported that in the four-month period between January to April 2020, phishing scams grew by 59%.
- Malware attacks increased by 36%. Over 48,000 malicious URLs were able to infiltrate the devices of unsuspecting Internet users.
Large corporations, especially those in vital sectors such as banking, retail, healthcare, and research, can’t risk having their employees getting exposed to such security threats. These data-driven organizations operate in highly regulated industries where non-compliance to strict security protocols can be extremely expensive. These firms demand –
- Internet solutions that offer strong price-performance ratios.
- Servers where it’s easy to anticipate technical and security risks.
- Hosting solutions that don’t dampen their business growth objectives.
What these firms essentially need are resilient and very high-bandwidth networks. All of these qualities/features can be found in high bandwidth dedicated servers. During the pandemic, firms dealing with high demands for workload availability were the first to pursue dedicated server options via high-quality vendors.
With the help of their dedicated server providers, these firms were able to outsource responsibilities such as – setting up the server, optimizing the network for company-specific requirements, and day-to-day maintenance duties (e.g., regular security patching).
The dedicated servers of these firms are hosted in local data centers – managers and administrators can even tour these facilities whenever they want. At the root of this upsurge in demand for dedicated hosting solutions is the desire to not share server resources with other business websites.
Companies have realized that when they have entire servers under their control, tasks like powering up their business websites or company-specific applications become much easier and much more secure. They gain total control over server architecture (including security), despite paying relatively small monthly fees to remote dedicated server hosting providers.
Dedicated Servers and Data-Driven Organizations – A Security-Based Partnership
Just by getting a dedicated server, a company automatically strengthens its security. They don’t have to stress over the possibility of sharing server resources with potentially nefarious actors. Hosting business websites and applications on dedicated servers, of course, has countless other advantages.
But, companies that are focused on data security are taking more steps to make their dedicated servers impenetrable against security threats. Some steps that top companies are taking to provide added protection to their dedicated servers include –
- Installing DDoS protection to prevent DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service). DDoS protection features can be acquired based on the sizes of attacks companies wish to prevent. Many dedicated server providers even offer free DDoS protection (basic versions) that protect company servers against attacks of up to 20gbps.
- Conducting regular data backups. Scheduling consistent data backups protect business websites from all types of attacks or data breaches. Even if hack attacks or data breaches do take place, companies can easily protect their websites and apps from facing serious long-term damage. Restore important business files and website data within seconds of a data breach event. Since most dedicated server providers allow clients to set up and schedule automatic data backups, the risk of data loss is almost zero.
- Protecting mission-critical applications. Companies that work with mission-critical applications on their dedicated servers get amazing uptimes and consistent performances. The control business administrators have over their workloads is phenomenal on these servers. Be it an internal application that’s vital for employees to carry out company operations seamlessly or a customer-facing app that’s always in-demand – the consistent delivery of data resources on dedicated servers maximizes security and functionality.
Dedicated server plans also come with regular security updates and patches. These features are designed to fix any pre-existing vulnerabilities in the server or the applications that are being used on the server. Although dedicated servers cost much more than shared hosting plans or virtual private servers, the amazing security features they offer, make them more than worthwhile investments for big, data-driven companies.