For quite some time, businesses were primarily interested in sharing data within an office or campus environment, this led to the development of various protocols suited specifically to this task. Within the last five years, businesses have begun to need to share data across wide areas. While reality is rapidly approaching this utopian picture, several relatively minor issues have changed status from low priority to extreme importance. Security is probably the most well known of these problems. When businesses send private information across the net, they place a high value on it getting to its destination intact and without being intercepted by someone other than the intended recipient.
Individuals sending private communications obviously desire secure communications.
Finally, connecting a system to a network can open the system itself up to attacks. If a system is compromised, the risk of data loss is high. Currently, there are no systems in wide use that will keep data secure as it transits a public network. Several methods are available to encrypt traffic between a few coordinated sites. Unfortunately, none of the current solutions scale particularly well.