ABSTRACT
Now that Web sites have moved beyond static marketing sites and simple E-commerce storefronts, corporations face the challenge of making their internal “protected” databases available to the world. Companies are being forced to open their systems to provide real-time transactional capabilities to customers and partners or risk losing market share to more accessible competitors. Until now, companies had to host their own Web site internally to achieve this so that they could attach directly to the corporate databases. This involved not only the need for additional hardware and increased communication capability, but also highly skilled IT resources to manage the site and the associated security risks.
