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

Operational Considerations

The operation of your site will vary greatly as determined by its usage model and the type of CMS you have. If you are running a small WordPress site that has little traffic and its crashing wouldn't matter much, then, operationally, you have nothing to be concerned about. However, if you were running a large Joomla! or Drupal site that supports an active and profitable customer base, you are likely tweaking and caring for it regularly.

The operations for your site will consist of many items, including the following:

• Disaster recovery and business continuity plan — This represents the procedure and plan for how you will react to various types of problems that could hit your website or operations. This disaster and business continuity plan should contain all the elements needed for successful restoration and recovery of your web business and online systems.
• Backup and offsite storage of data — Making a backup is clearly important. After you make a backup, the next step is to actually copy it to a local drive or media such as CD-ROM, DVD, or a USB drive. Other types of operations may require backup tapes. In all cases, making an offline copy of data from the server to a local machine or storage system is paramount.
• Patching — This is the term used in the technology space to apply updates to software. The application of patches in a small organization is usually done periodically, and depends on your setup. A medium-sized business will have to manage the ...