There are so many threats to your security that it is essential to remain ever vigilant-without ending up with your server in a bunker of lead wearing a tinfoil hat protecting data by keeping it completely inaccessible to any human eyes. Business needs connectivity to customers, and customers need connectivity to their data. Security is one of the most important tasks when setting up and creating a new application, yet it is often overlooked and dealt with late in the application building process. Whether or not this is acceptable is generally up to your requirements and how your application will be built, but at one point or another, your application team must take the time to get serious about security. Over and over, stories in the news report data being stolen, and the theft is inevitably due to poor security. In the last edition of this book, I used the example of an election official’s stolen laptop in my home city of Nashville, Tennessee; names, addresses, and partial social security numbers were stolen. Since then, there has been a steady stream of such stories, and probably the most high profile has been Sony’s Playstation network getting hacked and being down for months. Hence, if you are the architect of a database system that holds personal and private information, it could be you who becomes jobless with a stain on your career the size of the Mojave desert and possibly quite unemployed if it turns out to be your fault that data leaked out into the hands of some junkie looking for stuff to hock.