Question

We have a LAMP environment running our internal customer database. I want
to provide a customer portal so customers can view and update their
profile and billing online.

The two approaches I have come up with are:
to allow the public webserver limited access to the internal database OR to regularly copy the relevant pieces of internal data to an external database that is accessible to the public webserver.

edit: I do not want to simply copy/replicate the whole database because there are encrypted credit cards stored in a column that I do not want to make available to the public webserver in any way. However other data in that table I do want available.

Are these the only two ways to do this? What method would you choose?

Answer 1

I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to accomplish, so here is a wild guess:

I would make some (kind of) API for the public portal to use.