Small-to-medium sized businesses (SMB) are increasingly relying upon web-based applications and web-enabled services for running their business. Applications such as CRM, e-commerce transactions and other web-enabled applications are accessed both locally and remotely from outside the business facilities.

These web-based applications are vulnerable to attacks from viruses, intrusions, and denial of service (DoS) attacks, as traffic comes into the network through various ports and firewalls without being inspected.