Access, authorization, and authentication. Now, two areas, as always: we have our traditional off-the-shelf tools and our custom tools. All of these come with a level of security, and it’s up to you to pick what you’re comfortable with. With our traditional tools, we have to pay for a higher level of security, or even for enterprise-grade security. We’re going to pay heavily for that. The same applies to custom tools. But if we haven’t gotten to the point where you’re willing to spend that much, there are still ways we can authorize and authenticate access to our tools. We can have user groups, create role-based permissions, and allow certain people to access certain things while other people cannot view them, no matter where they turn. That information simply doesn’t reach them. Their view is completely separate from everyone else’s.
As always, this can be done with a little tweaking. For your traditional tools, some allow two-factor authentication, depending on what you’re willing to pay for. Even then, some of them are quite flexible with permissions, who is allowed to edit, who is allowed to view, and who is allowed to do what. But let’s move on to the more custom tools and look at access, authorization, user groups, and role-based permissions. With access, we can have Google Sign-In if possible. We can have a situation where users receive a one-time access code that’s sent to them to log in, or they have one-time login links that expire after use. It all depends on the level of security, privacy, or protection that you want for the application. But at the end of the day, you’re still going to be paying a lot more for higher levels of security.