An application or cloud hosting service vendor provides full security to the customers of the cloud hosted ACT! cutomer relationship and management program or software by deploying stringent security technologies which help in defending hosted ACT! CRM software from various kinds of viruses, Trojans, spyware, malware, etc. An application hosting service vendor's security expert assesses the security of a website, for example, a web shop selling products, or an application program such as ACT! CRM software for a client by performing an attack and penetration test. This test consists of both automated and manual testing and results in a list of vulnerabilities which require the attention of the client. An injection vulnerability allows the threats to manipulate the queries which are executed on the database, enabling the threat to read all the information in the database. Since the database contains all client and order information, this attack would compromise the confident iality of this information.
Each vulnerability poses a risk to the client, who has to decide whether to accept the risk or mitigate it by solving the problem, implementing controls or using insurance. This is the essence of risk management. In the world of commerce, such decisions are ideally based on money; if the risk is expressed in an expected loss dollar figure, it can be compared to the cost of solving the problem and other mitigation solutions. To calculate the expected loss, the likelihood (what is the chance of the risk happening) is multiplied by the impact (what is the cost if the risk happens). However, both the likelihood and the impact are hard to quantify. Determining the impact of the risk (a dollar amount of loss) is a question for the financing department of the client and should not be the responsibility of the security expert of a cloud computing service provider. The likelihood however, is something that is asked of an ACT! hosting service provider's security expert to calculate. Currently, calculating the likelihood is not possible as there are no clear data or metrics on this. Hence, the likelihood is often defined using categories of high, medium and low, resulting in an approximation of each risk. In this scenario, the likelihood is categorized as high, since the commonly used National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST standard defines this as - The threat source is highly motivated and sufficiently capable, and controls to prevent the vulnerability from being exercised are ineffective. This definition is inaccurate, since it is not taking into account any quantitative information, for example, whether threats are trying to compromise the website or the application such as hosted ACT! software at all.
The problem of selecting a likelihood for each vulnerability can be solved by an ACT! software hosting service provider's security expert by using a divide and conquer approach; the problem can be split into two smaller problems which can be solved separately. The answers of the smaller problems can then be combined to give a quantitative basis to an estimation on the likelihood of a vulnerability. First, the cloud computing or cloud hosting service provider's security expert creates a threat profile for each vulnerability to specify the type of threat that is able to exploit this vulnerability. This profile could include properties like the skill level, the intensity of the attacks, and so forth. Security experts can have a consensus on how these threat profiles are created for each vulnerability, so this is not guesswork.
An ACT! CRM software hosting service provider offers 24 by 7 technical support service. Users of ACT! software on cloud provider get benefits of rolling data backup technology. Any place, any time accessibility via the Internet is offered by an application hosting service provider that provisions ACT! hosting service to the users.
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