We used to have simple web sites. The web server sent HTML to the browser which displayed it. This was a "brochureware" site; designed for marketing or advertising. There was no business data anywhere near the web site.
Now we no longer have web sites, we have web applications; and soon, web services. Web applications reside on multiple systems in distributed architectures, using sophisticated programming languages. Corporate and customer data has been moved to the computing edge. The edge has been extended to mobile phones, PDAs, mobile sales force systems, inventory management systems, etc.
Web applications invite public access to an organisation's most sensitive data. Customer information, transaction information and even proprietary corporate data can be accessed through web applications.
The link for this article located at net-security is no longer available.
