Editorials

Protect Your Servers

Your server assets are essential to the performance of your business. Most businesses can’t afford to lose a server. It costs money, and the cost escalates as the time offline increases. This may not be true in all situations. I would estimate that the majority of us face real financial pain when our servers go offline.

If the loss of a server has important ramifications, then we need to modify our processes accordingly. The first practice I think should be considered is the creation of accounts with restricted capabilities. By having restricted capabilities when you are working on your servers, it keeps you from making mistakes. For example, if you are working on a production database server, it makes sense to log in with credentials that only allow you to select data. This keeps you from executing any INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE commands by accident.

If you find you need to modify a production database, you can use the limited credentials to write the necessary queries for making changes. Then, once you have the appropriate queries perfected, preferably by executing them on a non-production instance, you can login to your production server with higher credentials and make the changes.

The limited credentials not only help protect you personally from doing harm, they also protect you should your credentials be hacked. The point is not to use administrative or root privileges when performing tasks that don’t require the blanket capabilities of administrator.

Another process I find helpful, although not convenient, is to disable browsing the internet, or accessing Email. If you need to do research to manage your server, do it on another machine. If you need to copy text for typing reasons, use a different way to get that data to your server. If you do use Email, restrict it to specific emails where you are 100% sure of the source and the content. You can’t afford to have a phishing email attack on your server.

All of these recommendations are painful, adding additional complexity and time to managing your servers. We do it because the cost of server loss is greater that the inconvenience we experience. That’s why the server software doesn’t force you to use safe practices by default. This is a behavior you must force upon yourself.

What other behaviors have you found useful to help protect your server resources? Do you use them in all environments, or just production? Leave a comment with your suggestions, and share it with the rest of us.

Cheers,

Ben