How do you cost effectively defend web applications from attack? Your organization relies on mission critical business applications that contain sensitive information about customers, business processes and corporate data. Moving away from proprietary client/server applications to web applications gives you a simpler, cost-effective, highly extensible delivery platform. These applications are more than a valuable tool to power your business operations; they are also a valuable and vulnerable target for attackers. Web applications are increasingly the preferred targets of cyber-criminals looking to profit from identity theft, fraud, corporate espionage, and other illegal activities.

The impact of an attack can be significant, and include costly and embarrassing service disruptions, down-time, lost productivity, stolen data, regulatory fines, angry users and irate customers. Beyond preserving the corporate brand, federal and state legislation and industry regulations are now requiring web applications to be better protected. As you take action to protect web applications in a timely and effective manner, you must balance the need for security with availability, performance and cost-effectiveness. Protecting web applications requires both zero-day protection and rapid response with minimal impact to operations, and must be part of a defense-in-depth plan. Look to host-based intrusion defense systems to provide comprehensive security to proactively protect hosts, applications and sensitive data without impacting performance or changing system architectures.

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