GOING LIVE!!!

Hello everyone

2-3 years ago I came up with the idea of building an accountancy based web application. What started off as a bit of a pipe dream is now slowly turning in to a reality and I’m finally beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel. I was hoping to reach out to the Laravel community to help alleviate some of my concerns before I push the big green deploy button.

Firstly, a bit of background about me. I'm an accountant by trade and started learning PHP a few years ago. I am by no means an expert but through hours of combing through the vast resource that is the internet and regularly referring to the Laravel documentation I’ve somehow managed to build what I set out to do. Laravel is my first PHP framework.

I won’t go in to too much detail about my site but once you have registered a user you create a company and pay a monthly subscription for access to different types of accountancy modules. My site will be storing information of a sensitive nature which leads me to a few questions:

1. What steps should I be taking before I go live to make sure my customers data is secure?

2. What should I be doing after I go live to make sure my customers data stays secure?

3. Are there any certificates/accreditations I can get to reassure my customers my site is secure?

4. What are the pitfalls of just biting the bullet, going live and fixing any problems as they come along?

Off the top of my head I have used GitHub for version tracking, Braintree for subscriptions, a Forge provisioned AWS and a Cloudflare SSL certificate.

Thank you Taylor Otwell for an amazing framework and thanks to the community for your valuable contributions to these forums.

Best wishes