When you're talking about placing orders, processing the requests that are coming from your customers, your prospects, from your internal employees, human resource data, a request for some benefits change, it is really important that you pay attention to security. SSL is an encryption-based technology that was proposed by Netscape and has now been widely adopted throughout the industry. SSL is a pretty good solution. It's not perfect. IP is a sessionless protocol.
Encryption depends on the existence of a session.
We encrypt messages based upon a key that is in place for the duration of the transfer of some number of messages. We call those number of messages per session. The trick here is that you have to know when the session is over. If you're running on IP, which has no concept of a session, then you have no explicit way of knowing when a session is over, and, therefore, you don't know when the encryption should end. It was a very strong demonstration of the fact that there are holes in some of these technologies.