How To Secure Your Servers: The Top 5 Best Practices

By Author: Harry Smith
Total Articles: 19
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Securing your servers is an essential part of maintaining secure IT systems, and there are a few best practices that should be followed to ensure they remain safe. In this post, we’ll cover the top six server security best practices that businesses should implement to protect their data and operations from malicious attacks.

Establish a secure login procedure
Using strong passwords is essential in keeping your servers safe from hackers. A secure login procedure should include enforcing password complexity requirements such as using at least 8-10 characters with a combination of numbers, special characters, and upper-case and lower-case letters. Additionally, it's important to regularly update passwords and establish multi-factor authentication wherever possible.

Perform regular system updates
Software updates are vital in keeping your servers protected against cyber threats. Updates usually contain patches for specific vulnerabilities or bug fixes — both of which can help prevent outside attackers from gaining access to sensitive information ...
... stored on your servers. It's good practice to run automated scans for software vulnerabilities regularly and install the relevant updates as soon as possible when they become available from the vendor.

Use firewalls
Firewalls provide an extra layer of protection between external threats and the internal parts of your network (e.g., servers). As such, it's highly recommended that you deploy a firewall solution along with other security measures — either hardware or software based — to keep malicious traffic out and give you more control over who can access your networks/servers and how they interact with them.

Monitor user access on your system
It's crucial that you have visibility into who is accessing what resources on your server environment so that any suspicious activity can be identified quickly. To accomplish this goal, it's important to set up monitoring tools (e.g., logging) so you can track user behavior within the system — including data transfers, file creations/deletions, automated processes being used etcetera — which will help you detect any malicious actions before they cause significant damage or disruption to operations if left unchecked in time.

Implement host hardening methods
It’s also important to note that not all threats come from outside sources; even users on your own network can attack by exploiting server vulnerabilities if proper security measures aren't taken into account when configuring them for use within the infrastructure environment (e.g., opening port 21 when not needed). To prevent these scenarios from occurring, organizations should make sure users only have access to what they need through “host hardening” techniques like creating separate user accounts for each person accessing the system or implementing directory permissions on certain folders/files within it.
In conclusion, implementing reliable precautionary measures is key for securing server environments; every organization should follow these best Practices.