Nowadays, Internet is no longer just about e-mail and Web sites. The net has become the critical medium, powering a growing list of revenue-generating business activities from e-commerce and e-supply chain management to online marketplaces and collaboration. The sum of all these activities can acquire the term Web Services.
In the beginning, the internet was mostly helping different people to communicate with each other. Web services on the other hand are useful in helping different applications to interact and communicate. In the past, a purchasing agent might send a purchase order to a supplier via email. In the age of Web Services, a company's purchasing application communicates via the Internet directly with a supplier's warehousing application to check price and availability, submitting the purchase order to the supplier's shipping application automatically, with little or no human intervention. The benefits of Web Services are not limited to interactions between different companies. Business units within the same enterprise often use very different processing environments. Each domain is likely to be managed differently and under the control of different organizations. What makes Web Services so interesting is that they provide interoperability across processing domains. The presence of this interoperability across processing domains constitutes a fundamental shift, one that gives opportunities for tremendous benefits in terms of accuracy productivity and efficiency. Indeed, different IT organizations just begin to understand the full potential of Web Services. However, while Web services offer great advantages, they also present some challenges relating to security and privacy. It was only been in the last five years that we have experienced this tremendous explosion in demand for security services. All aspects of information security have taken on a greater emphasis as a direct result of the Internet's flexible design and the explosive increase in its usage.
