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August 5, 2016 Comments closed

HostingCon Reflections – Now is the Time to Focus on SSL

in Industry Lowdown

The SSL Store™ EVP Michael Ward’s musings from HostingCon 2016.

We just returned from HostingCon Global 2016 in beautiful New Orleans. The show was a resounding success; the venue was great—everything was excellent.

Personally, I love going to these kinds of conventions. It’s great to get out and meet the talented and forward-thinking men and women that make up the web hosting industry. And HostingCon brought with it some of the best and the brightest.

That’s why it was so exciting to announce our company’s new partnership-level with Symantec there, Over the course of the 4-day conference one of the major themes at the convention was the web browser community’s push to have the entire internet encrypted by as early as the end of 2016.

There have been a number of ways this initiative has been pushed forward, from free Domain Validation SSL offerings by industry upstarts and non-profits, to moves the browsers themselves are making – moves like keeping advanced features exclusive to sites with encryption, giving even larger SEO boosts to sites with SSL and starting to roll out permanent warnings when users try to connect to an unsecure site – in an attempt to motivate all websites to encrypt worldwide.

Soon, any site that doesn’t have SSL will be at a very obvious competitive disadvantage with the rest of the internet—in addition to being vulnerable to prying eyes.

And that’s why we’re so proud to be Symantec’s first Encryption Everywhere partner in the Americas—further strengthening our partnership with Symantec. The Encryption Everywhere program is going to be a revolutionary step in encrypting the entire internet. For those that are not yet familiar, Symantec – the largest name in web security – along with our help, has created a comprehensive program that will give web hosts and registrars the technical and business means to package complimentary basic encryption solutions with all of their hosting and/or domain packages. This comes with a built-in strategy to help customers find the right security solution for their needs.

This is a mutually beneficial partnership for each company and all end-users. The SSL Store™ will be given top-level access to Symantec’s considerable resources and backed by one of the biggest names in web security, while Symantec will be able to tap into our resources and leverage our existing relationships with more than 7,000 resellers in more than 120 countries in addition to gaining a greater degree of agility when dealing with small and medium-sized hosting companies.

Frankly, this is a new way to look at SSL that will open up some extremely exciting possibilities now and even further down the line. As DV encryption becomes the web’s new minimum standard, we’ll be able to better underscore the need for higher-value business-level authentication and in doing so, create a far safer, more identity-focused online environment for e-commerce, finance, healthcare and all other sectors that so desperately need it.

Thinking back to my own experience working in the hosting and domain registrar sectors, I can see a number of intriguing applications and opportunities that will stem from this Encryption Everywhere program.

SSL finally adapts to the way web hosts operate

For web hosts, being able to offer complimentary encryption to all customers to satisfy the new security demands of browsers from a very structured and scalable platform provides a tremendous opportunity and fills an immediate gap in the web hosting industry. And by making basic DV SSL standard, it easily opens the door to lucrative opportunities for a range of customers that need higher value website security solutions. It really is the first freemium model the SSL/TLS industry has seen and now allows a web host to naturally put online security at the forefront to 100% of their customer-base.

Remember, as of 2015 it was estimated that between just 3-5% of the internet was encrypted. As that number grows, and encryption becomes standard, the higher value security solutions, including Extended Validation and wildcards, will now appeal to a much broader audience  which should make business boom across the entire industry at levels that were never before thought possible.

Encryption Everywhere creates new opportunities in the domain space

As SSL/TLS begins to get the attention it deserves, new opportunities pop-up all over the place. Right away as I see it,  there are the new top-level domains (TLDs) that have been recently introduced, many of which will likely see a considerable boost to their credibility when associated with higher value SSL offerings. .BANK, .ACCOUNTANT, .MARKETS, .BROKER and .SECURITY are a few new generic name extensions that immediately come to mind that will gain increased credibility with the coupling of an SSL.

Not to mention, any DOT BRAND that wants to establish credibility in the new extension space should automatically have an Extended Validation SSL on their newly branded site as a standard. Having an EV SSL on a site using a BRAND TLD will give the site instant credibility. And help assure first-time visitors that these sites are legitimate and who they say they are.

This is truly an exciting time to be a part of the web security and web hosting industries—and The SSL Store™ is proud to be leading the charge.

• #Encryption Everywhere
• #Symantec
• #The SSL Store™