The reason that there’s a need for information security is because of its flip side. The hacking community. Of course, even in the absence of this, it’s just good policy and common sense to put some basic protections in place, but these protections are made all the more important by virtue of the presence of an increasingly organized community of hackers.

In so many ways, computers have made our lives easier and more productive. The convenience of having a Fortune 500 company’s inventory information displayed on one screen, rather than having to go digging through a dozen (or more) different ledgers and sending secretaries scrambling to chase down errant bits of data is both hugely time saving and enables better real time decision making.

These days, most companies have a pretty firm handle on the basics of network security. There have been too many successful hacking incursions into major companies not to, and the businessman who does not mind this part of his duties is all too often in for a nasty surprise as data is lost or stolen.

There are a great many companies for whom their web portal represents a significant percentage of annual sales. In fact, for some companies, their web portal represents their entire sales channel (think Amazon, and most of the eBay Power Sellers).

Often, programmers like to create “back doors” to the software systems they write. Most of the time, there is no nefarious intent here. The back door is merely a means to an end, with the end being to facilitate debugging, or to allow an alternate way of accessing information in the event of a catastrophic software crash.