| TYPICAL WEB APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT SCENARIO |
| Characteristic | Exposure | Description |
| Security Risk | HIGH | The weakest feature of such deployment is that it relies on ability of the application infrastructure (i.e. web server, web application server or database server) to resist the attack. |
| Maintenance | HIGH | Each application server and each firewall requires continuous security and/or application maintenance to address the latest security threat. |
| Cost | HIGH | Security related application updates and their expedited functionality testing, integration testing and implementation, usually drive the cost of this solution much higher than anticipated. Also, the timing of changes can not be anticipated, hence it is hard to budget for such changes. |
| Scalability | HIGH | Web application architecture is usually easily horizontally scalable. |
| Economies of scale | LOW | Although convenient, horizontal scalability usually means that the solution will become more and more complex and hence, expensive, as number of infrastructure elements increases. |