Microsoft, more than any other company, has raised the ire of corporate America for flaws in its widely used Windows operating system. Although many might dispute how successful Microsoft has been in eradicating software flaws, fewer people are questioning the company's focus on security and its acquisition of tools to lock down code.
"Bill Gates has it right, with all due respect to those who want to bash Microsoft -- there is nobody that doesn't have to deal with this issue," said Steve Orrin, chief technology officer for Sanctum, the maker of a tool to check Web applications for security holes. "There was no one forcing QA (quality assurance) to think of security. That is night and day, compared to what is happening now."
Driven by the concerns of corporate customers that fear the Internet's darker denizens, companies such as Sanctum see business booming, as more businesses look for ways to check the security of the software they rely on. Many hope to vet their in-house applications, but the majority want to check products that they will ship or software that is produced by outside partners.
Sanctum, which had originally focused on creating software that could act as a barrier between online attackers and Web servers, found the interest from developers in its software's security-auditing capabilities so high that it has decided to target that market.
"We evolved our whole corporate strategy over the last year toward development," Orrin said. "We have been surprised at the acceleration of behavioural change that has occurred."
What's changed is that Internet-connected businesses can no longer afford to rely on software riddled with bugs, said Mike Armistead, founder and vice president of marketing of code analysis toolmaker Fortify Software.
"We all became interconnected, which has been a productivity boom, but no one thought that you would have so many people from the outside having access," he said.
