Over the past year, we have learned some pretty valuable lessons. Fortunately, we were able to implement most of what we learned.
As a translation company, we get to see confidential material all the time. And we need to make sure it stays confidential. Exchanging files via email attachments or FTP does not fulfill these requirements for us. You can call us paranoid or overcautious but we don't want to see a client's international marketing campaign materials made public because of a leak in our process.
For many years, we have been using our web-based portal "Babel" to handle most of the aspects of running our business. About a year ago we found it was the time to secure it even more.
Just using the http level of security was not secure enough to protect our customers' and partners' assets.
We obtained an SSL certificate and installed it on our server. From then on, each login to http://www.beatbabel.com would automatically be routed to an HTTPS address. Each page was covered by the certificate.
But over time, we realized that using one certificate to cover all aspects of access to our web site was not the ideal solution.
Recently, we updated our website and went to an external hosting solution instead of hosting it in-house. The hosting solution does not allow securing the website.
On the other hand, "Babel" is run on internal servers and all its data will stay in-house. To access "Babel", we needed secure access.
The situation put us in a predicament. How could someone
- reach BeatBabel.com via standard http format, and
- reach "Babel" via https
Standard routing does not work in this case. The options:
- either we go back to http for everything - that was not really an option ...
- find another hosting option that allows https for everything, or
- split the site into a public and a secure site.
We decided to go for the third option.
Fortunately, we not only own BeatBabel.com but also BeatBabel.net (and a few variations thereof, just in case someone confuses Babel with Babble...). So the decision was made to keep BeatBabel.com public and reachable via http and to put Babel "behind" a certificate that covers BeatBabel.net.
What does this mean for visitors and partners?
Not much. Visitors will still find us at BeatBabel.com. And if you are a partner, going to BeatBabel.net will take you directly to the portal login page. Or you can just follow the link on our website. Of course, if you have bookmarked the "old" link, now would be a good time to edit that bookmark to reflect the new address.
Come and check it out.