Web applications and the delivery of services from those apps are particularly complex. Typically, services are delivered to the end user using a multi-tiered architecture with application servers and web servers that are accessible from the public internet, while communicating with middleware services, backend servers, and databases located on the internal network.
The complexity is increased by several additional factors that must be taken into account during testing, which include the following:
- Network architecture, including security controls (firewalls, IDS/IPS, and honeypots), and configurations such as load balancers
- The platform architecture (hardware, operating system, and additional applications) of systems that host web services
- Applications, middleware, and final-tier databases, which may employ different platforms (Unix or Windows), vendors...
