Applications are becoming more pervasive, organizations are growing and implementing smarter software to support business process, product development and daily operations. The way businesses are dealing with their customers, their partners and their own internal businesses is changing and becoming more complex. New SOA-oriented architectures and the extension of things like the electrical grid are becoming an essential part of an organization’s everyday.

So it is natural that the security ramifications of deploying all of these applications are a very important concern for customers. They’ve generally done a very good job over the last 10 or 15 years in understanding the established security technologies for tasks like networking and operations, and managing security procedures like access control or authentication. But now, as these new applications roll out, they’re really changing the game.

In many ways, these applications can exist in a couple of worlds. Sometimes they can have portions of their behavior inside a firewall, while sometimes it will be external to the firewall, such as the web-facing front end to a legacy back-end application. The possible security problems are not just the threat surface that gets exposed with new applications, but are also the composite of behaviors that goes on outside the firewall at the front end of the application, and all of the possible unintended consequences of the new exposure to the internal application.

All of these things are conspiring together: the influx of new applications, the increased importance of applications for core business goals and the difficulty in terms of understanding the way in which all these components will play together. These forces are driving applications into a place of prominence in the current environment.