The Right Way to Password Protect a Database

Preventing unauthorized people from accessing your data and applications is the number one requirement for apps and sensitive databases. By using Caspio, you have access to the most sophisticated and robust capabilities for web user authentication.

This post will outline Caspio’s web user authentication capabilities and why they are unmatched. It does not discuss all the ways you can secure your data and apps with Caspio.

Unlimited Authentication Rules

You can define as many authentication objects (rules) as you want. Each Caspio DataPage (app interface) can have its own assigned authentication object, providing access only to those who are authenticated by that authentication rule.

For example, one authentication rule could be based on an employee’s database table, another on a customer’s table, and yet another on a partners table. You could get even more granular and create one rule for your sales staff and another for marketing and yet another for HR staff. Chances are that each set of users should only be authorized to access apps pertaining to their roles and responsibilities. Authentication objects are how you manage access to your apps.

No Proprietary Database

The key power of Caspio’s web authentication comes from the fact that there is no separate database to manage your users. Your users are managed in your own tables the same way any other data is managed in Caspio. Furthermore, your user data can be imported or exported at any time.

With almost all other online databases, your users are not managed in your regular tables. They are in a special systems table. In most cases your users, i.e. employees, vendors and customers must register with your online database provider before they can access your apps. Not so with Caspio. Your users are your users and they don’t need to be registered with Caspio. It’s your data and it’s all about your brand.

Unlimited Users

At the core of our beliefs is the idea of fair pricing. We think it’s outrageous for an online database company to charge you based on users. Why? It’s your app, your design, your idea, and all you are getting from your database vendor is the resources to run your app. Therefore you should be charged for the resources you use and not by how many people use the resources.

The concept of user-based pricing is as an old idea that stems from the enterprise software days. It’s a model that works great for service providers – but provides little value to the customer.  Because we don’t believe in user-based pricing and our custom online database is scalable to 2 million records per table, and since you can create as many authentication objects and rules as you want, you can literally have unlimited web users even in the smallest Caspio plan.

Self-Registration

All this boils down to friendly pricing and sheer capabilities for your apps. For example, with Caspio it’s easy to create self-service applications where each user has to first register on a web form, and then upon some sort of verification, such as an email link or payment, is given access to sections of an app that are password-protected. The entire process is easily automated.

Conclusion

As illustrated above, the security engine of Caspio is designed for scalability and ease of use. Password protecting a DataPage in Caspio takes less than 2 minutes – and that includes giving your users a self-service password recovery interface in case they lose their password.

If you haven’t tried the powerful web user management capabilities of Caspio, open a free trial account today and give it a spin.