Author: Writer

If you want to order a burger today in the streets, there’s no need to reach for your wallet. The modern world of e-commerce ensures that paying for services or any products is seamlessly done from a single tap on your phone. Conveniences brought about by online shopping is also another factor behind the growth of these digital payments.

However, it’s important to understand that e-commerce and digital money transfer have their fair share of risks. Most payment platforms leave your details and other sensitive information unprotected from third parties. Therefore, ensuring good security habits when making mobile payments is the only safety precaution to protect your financial data.

Best Cybersecurity Practices for Online Mobile Payments

Though cyberspace transactions relieve you from physical money losses, there’s still a reason to take caution with your transactions. Opting for the best cybersecurity practices is the only assurance against losing your data and financial information to fraudulent hands. Below is our compilation of the safety practices you should employ when doing your transactions

Avoid Making Payments Over a Public Network

Situation: Making online transactions has tremendous exposure to risks (which you’re already aware of). The most significant risk among them is the disclosure of your data.

Problem: A public network is a goldmine for online hackers who are always looking out for the best ways to compromise your data. Since these networks are unencrypted and unsecured, any information entered on a public network can be easily picked.

Solution: Download a VPN to encode your online activity is your only guarantee of safety when using a public network. If you don’t have VPN protection, avoid logging in to sites with your sensitive information.

Limit the Usage of Your Debit Cards

Situation: When you get used to making payments through your debit cards, much of your information is left unprotected. This gets even worse if the transaction network lacks encryption for personal data safety.

Problem: As opposed to credit cards, debit cards are usually linked to your bank accounts. This puts you at significant risk if someone manages to hack your information. The hacker may authoritatively use the information to your detriment. Therefore, losing your money becomes easy.

Solution: It’s better to use credit cards and other forms of online payments for safety. This is because credit card companies can reverse any charge when a fraudulent site or transaction is established. Alternatively, it’s safe to ensure there is proper cyber safety if you can’t avoid debit cards.

Look for Secure Shopping Sites Only

Situation: The emergency of many online shopping sites and payment platforms is furtherance of more cyber insecurity. Not all of the sites and platforms bear the same safety guarantee levels. Therefore, the probability of finding yourself transacting on an insecure platform is quite high.

Problem: Your essential information is left unprotected on such a platform. Any moment your data is entered, hackers will have their way and possibly steal valuable information.

Solution: Stay alert and learn how to identify secure sites for online transactions. Encrypted and safe sites usually have their addresses start with ‘HTTPS,’ with an ‘s’ and the end. Any site that doesn’t appear in that format is not secure for a transaction.

Be Mindful of Your Passwords

Situation: Understandably, you may want to have one password that’s uniform to all sites and it’s relatively easy to remember. Well, your data security is actually at risk if the password has been used on multiple sites for transactions.

Problem: Your passwords are the front row protectors when it comes to keeping your important data secure. Therefore, overusing them for numerous online transactions elevates the risk of being hacked. Using simple passwords is also dangerous and increases the chances of getting hacked.

Solution: Password generators come in handy in ensuring you get strong passwords that are not worth a hacker’s time to crack. Also, if you share passwords for multiple sites, take the time to change them up.

Don’t Do Transactions That Ask for Too Much Information.

Situation: There are online payment sites that will put you through a long process of information sourcing. Some may even require more information for you to complete making your orders.

Problem: Sharing too much unnecessary information on any online platform puts you at phishing risks and many more. The more information shared, the more vulnerable you become to hacking.

Solutions: Ensure you read about the site’s privacy policy before sharing any information. Also, give necessary information only. If you encounter places where sharing information is optional, kindly take advantage of not sharing and stay out of harm’s way.

Conclusion

Keeping your data and other vital information safe is the only way you can avoid cyberspace cruelty. Sticking to the best practices and seeking safe mitigation such as the above-mentioned measures will help you ramp up your cybersecurity.

Many organizations are struggling with non-par database management solutions due to either too limited IT resources or the staff’s incompetency. However, failing to manage the database well as a critical technology will ultimately lead to the businesses’ total collapse in this data-intensive era. In this time and age of regular digital transformation, the excuses not to have a solid support solution for your SQL Server, Oracle, or MySQL databases are dwindling.

Those who cannot maintain in-house DBA (database administrators), especially the SMEs, can think of taking the assistance of managed database service providers or remote database administration services. This is an important step to ensure that your database is always up and running and also that you save a lot of time and effort compared to hiring and maintaining DBAs in-house. If you are still unsure whether it is the right time for you to think of remote DBA, let us explore some tell-tale signs showing that you are ready or overdue for a DBA upgrade.

1. Your to-do list related to database keeps on growing

From database upkeep to customizations, upgrading, and reporting, database management, and maintenance tasks are never done fully. A database needs constant upkeep and monitoring. Security, backup, and restoration needs too needed to be taken care of. So, if you are using only internal IT resources for covering all these critical tasks and technologies, then you may be facing a lot of expenditure in terms of it and also lack of time to execute all these tasks on time. Neither of these is a welcoming thing.

At this point, support from remote database services can effectively tackle this situation. They can take care of your routine database processes and explore new ways to enhance your database solutions to make it more competitive. Going further, your core IT team will also be set free from any routine and repetitive database tasks to focus more on developmental and strategic projects for your business to grow further.

2. You find it a struggle to bring in quality and skilled database professionals for managing your MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, or NoSQL databases internally

Whichever database or DBMS you maintain, it is crucial that you have skilled and knowledgeable administrators who can take care of the critical database tasks well. In the field of database administration, the expertise is all about experience and the most updated knowledge. However, it is not always possible for an enterprise to get expert DBAs in-house for a full-time job. When it comes to small businesses, these types of tasks usually go to whoever random with some knowledge in database tasks, ending in chaos. Most of the time, in small organizations, the individuals responsible for database tasks are not well experienced in fine-tuning the databases to ensure optimum performance.

Partnering with the most experienced managed database service providers, you instantly access the most skilled and expert DBAs working at such providers. Usually, the remote DBA services will have a full team of senior DBA professionals, who focus on the client database environments 24×7. With exposure to a wide range of client scenarios and use cases, they will surely be able to troubleshoot any database related errors on time and help you ensure optimum output from your database related tasks. So, by right sourcing the database management activities with remote DBA support from an expert managed service provider like RemoteDBA.com, you free up your IT team to focus more on their projects and bring in a whole new process in terms of database administration.

3. The end users of your database benefit from a help desk support

In a typical enterprise database management scenario, a DBA’s duty will surely go beyond just keeping the databases up and running. It is also important to ensure that relying on your database applications also gets enough support to move their activities forward. If you are getting by with the in-house DBA, there may usually be limitations with the essentials like bandwidth, etc. The expertise in handling end-user inquiries is most of the times out of the question in in-house DBA.

With remote DBA support, there are usually managed services providers who can help you with the administration of the database and offer the team extended customer support. There are dedicated and knowledgeable professionals for providing customer support, which can be extended to your business client base, who may have any queries related to the database applications they use.

4. You are ready to afford the database investments

Gaining complete value out of your database management system can be quite challenging when managing those databases on your own internally. Balancing your investment on it and returning from the same can also be challenging when you are thinking of outsourcing. You need to carefully consider your affordability of the remote database services against the value proposition to decide whether you are ready to go forward with remote database services.

You may look for and carefully consider all these signs to decide whether you are ready to go ahead with remote services for your enterprise database administration. While you start to consider it seriously, there are plenty of providers worldwide, and it will be difficult for you to identify which one suits your needs the best. For this, you need to thoroughly understand your database administration requirements. The kind of database you use, the volume of data to handle, the nature of data growth, confidentiality, and security requirements for your data everything is important to consider while planning to outsource your database. Above all these, considering the cost involved is of prime importance in finding reliable and expert remote DBA services. It is also advisable to share your requirements with multiple providers to get customized quotes from each and then compared those to identify which one suits the best to your needs and budget. Select the best and you will enjoy the benefits for a long time and also run your business without glitches.

About The Author –

Kristen Smith is a web developer and experienced professional in database management and administration. She says you must deploy credible companies like RemoteDBA.com to help you maintain and secure any database system with success!