The Importance of SSL Certificates in Websites

SSL certificates help to provide safety to the visitor of websites, it is a way to tell your customers that the site is genuine, authentic, and reliable to enter personal data. The acronym SSL responds to the terms (Secure Socket Layer), which is a security protocol that makes your data travel in a complete and secure way, the transmission of data between a server and a web user, and in feedback, it is fully encrypted.

All this leads us to understand that the technology provided by an SSL certificate is the secure transmission of information through the Internet. In order to use an SSL certificate, on your website, it is very important that the Internet server (host) you hired brings SSL support.

SSL certificates are important because to protect credit card transactions, data transfers, and logins, and more recently, it is becoming the standard for protecting social media browsing (GlobalSign, 2020).

How do SSL Certificates works?

Let’s start knowing that your computer communicate with a server when you reach a certain website and to guarantee the connection a protocol or language would be required. The most used protocol is HTTP that stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol and you will see it at the beginning of almost all the web address in the World Wide Web.

It is important to know that all the communication between the computer and the website would be sent in clear text, so all the information that is exchanged between your computer and that server including any data that you type on the website would be transferred over the public internet and because it was transported in clear text, your information is vulnerable to anybody who wanted, like hackers.

This is a big concern when we talk about data security, this is how HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) was created and becomes our hero when we are communicating with servers and is HTTP with a security feature that encrypts the data that is being exchanged between computers and servers, making the information impossible to read using encryption algorithms to scramble the data that is being transferred.

HTTPS secure the information exchanged between devices and servers using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) a protocol that ensures security on the internet, so when a computer connects to a website that is using SSL your browser going to ask the website to identify itself, so the web server will send a copy of its SSL Certificate to your browser, this certificate is a small digital document used to authenticate the identity of a website, basically is used to let your computer know that the website your visiting is trustworthy, so your browser will check to make sure that the information received is a trust certificate and if it does, a message will be sent to let the server know that the SSL section can proceed with the transmission of encrypted data.

By having a reliable SSL certificate, our data would be encrypted, at which point we can ensure that nobody can read its content. All this leads us to understand that the technology provided by an SSL certificate is the secure transmission of information through the Internet.

How to identify that a website is secure?

When you open a link or a website, the browser automatically change the standard HTTP to HTTPS, telling the browser that the connection between the server and browser must be secured using SSL.

Some browsers activate a padlock showing you that the browser connection to the server is now secure, when the padlock is broken or with a red color means that the page does not use SSL and might not be secure.

How is SSL technology used in practice in e-commerce transactions, online work processes, and online services?

  • Protect transactions made with bank cards.
  • Offer online protection to access to the system, confidential information transmitted through web forms or certain protected areas of web pages.
  • Protect webmail and applications such as web access to Outlook or Exchange servers and Office Communications.
  • Protect work processes and virtualization of applications such as Citrix Delivery platforms or cloud computing platforms.
  • Protect the connection between a mail client such as Microsoft Outlook and a mail server such as Microsoft Exchange.
  • Protect the transfer of files over HTTPS and FTP services, such as the updates of new pages by a website owner or the transmission of heavy files.
  • Protect access and activity in control panels such as Parallels or cPanel among others.
  • Protect intranet traffic such as internal networks, file sharing, extranets or database connections.
  • Protect access to networks and any other network traffic with SSL VPNs such as VPN access servers or applications such as Citrix Access Gateway.

All these applications have some points in common:

It is necessary to protect the confidentiality of the data transmitted through the Internet or any other network since nobody wants the information of your credit card, your account, your passwords or your personal data exposed on the Net.

It is necessary to guarantee the integrity of this data to avoid that once the credit card information has been sent and the amount has been confirmed, a hacker who has been able to intercept the information cannot change the amount charged and divert the money.

The company must guarantee to its clients or users of its extranet the authenticity of its identity and eliminate any doubt that a third party is supplanting it.

The organization must comply with regional, national and international regulations regarding privacy, security, and data integrity.

We need to know that a lot of websites are using HTTPS by default, regardless if sensitive data is going to be exchanged or not. Also, important browsers as Google and Bing are flagging websites as “not secure” if they are not SSL protected and these websites would be penalized in the browsers search rankings.

To sum up, the benefits of activating SSL certificates for your business or personal websites are incredible, and some web hosting providers have made installing them easy and quick. Don’t miss taking full advantage of the HTTPS revolution, add an extra layer of security for your website visitors and gain their trust (Nikolov, 2018).

SSL certificates are important for your website because ensure and protect your visitor’s data and also can help you to reach the top in the web browsers rankings.

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