Health Care

Why do websites get hacked? Websites get hacked for a bunch of different reasons:

That's the essence of a question I got today. And it's not one that can be answered easily, because there's no such thing as a site being "secure." It's not an either/or question, it's really a "how much" type of question. How hot is it today? Let's take a look at the temperature -- hot for you may well be different than hot for me. I'm from Alaska, after all...

All the planning and preparation in the world won't prevent an incident, but it can greatly reduce the consequences.

Nothing better prepares you for responding to disaster than experience. In the world of web applications, sometimes we act as firefighters, coming in to rescue the smoldering remains of a hacked site, a crashed server, or an unexpected traffic burst.

No matter how diligent you are at preventing vulnerabilities and securing your environment, it's impossible to be completely secure on the Internet. What you can do is plan for how to limit the damage that people can do when they manage to compromise some part of your system. This line of thinking is called "Defense in depth" -- you can't just apply security updates and call it good.

At Freelock, we don't think one backup is enough. All kinds of things can, and often do go wrong. Murphy was an optimist, after all.

The International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH), a non-profit collaboration between the University of Washington and the University of California, San Francisco, came to Freelock for help building an internal system to improve collaboration and communication within their organization. With a headquarters in Seattle and teams spread across the rest of the world working diligently to improve the development of skilled medical workers and health delivery systems an online based intranet is a perfect solution.

We built a system using a heavily customized Open Atrium installation that features separate, private spaces for each country's program. These spaces provide a central location for every level of the program's operation from overall yearly goals down to an individual user's daily tasks.

How would losing your web site affect your business?

That might seem like a silly question, but a surprising number of small organizations don't think it can happen to them. Think again -- web sites get lost all the time, through a variety of means. The server hosting your site might have a hardware failure. Your site might get hacked. Your web developer might accidentally delete something critical. Your host might go out of business, leaving you stranded. If you're in the tech world, you hear about these incidents all the time.

I have a lot of respect for graphic designers and people who can come up with clear, concise information in a graphical way. Which is why I'm a huge fan of GraphViz, a crazily effective layout engine for drawing flow charts, graphs, and the like -- you basically throw pairs of labels at it and it draws lines (called "edges" in mathematical graph-speak) between them, doing its best to automatically lay out everything so there's minimal line-crossing.

There are basically 3 models for getting web applications built:

• Proprietary platform
• Custom code
• Open Source
  

I get this question all the time: What's the difference between Drupal and Ruby on Rails, or another framework?

Quite simply, Rails is something you build an application in. Drupal is an application. So chances are you're one major step closer to building a web site that does what you want it to do, if you start with Drupal.