Web application security specialist Bee Ware has launched a new product designed to improve the performance and availability of firms' web apps and portals while optimising security.

The firm's i-Boost appliance incorporates Bee Ware's ICX threat-detection and analysis engine, and capabilities to improve application performance, in some cases by as much as 800 percent, according to Bee Ware's vice-president of sales and marketing, Stephan Mesguich.

"It is clear that most customers have to deal with balancing the availability of applications and protecting them from attacks," he added. "The heart of the appliance is based on performance and availability, and we can maximise availability by using load-balancing features."

Nissim Bar-El, chief executive of IT security consultancy Comsec Consulting, said awareness of the need for web application security has grown a great deal in recent months.
But he added that the risk of data breaches through this layer could be reduced if firms invested more money in the development phase to engineer security into web apps from the start.