CMS Security Handbook: The Comprehensive Guide for WordPress®, Joomla!®, Drupal™, and Plone®

CHAPTER 4

Baselining Your Existing Website

In any business operation, you certainly want to consider both man-made and natural disasters that could impact your IT functions. You should create a matrix to identify what threats exist in your operation, the level of impact they could have, and what the plan of action is. This is known as the baseline.

In a phrase, this is an analysis of the impact statement to your business — that is, what the loss or reduction of availability of an IT system would have on your business. Out of this, you'll be able to the mix the risk management into your planning.

A very simple example of a baseline report could involve the server environment for your office. You would be concerned about power, backups, and cooling. You should also be concerned about the uninterruptable power supply (UPS), whether you keep backups onsite or take them away, and the capability to cool the server in the summer if you lost air conditioning. Table 4-1 shows what the baseline report for these concerns would look like.

Table 4-1: Sample Baseline Report

This very simple example shows where some of the operational threats are for a system.

This chapter shows you how to review the server and the CMS to make a determination of what threats exist in your site, and what mitigating ...