Drivers for the demilitarized zone solution pattern include:

• The risk of attack will be higher if the potential rewards from the attack are high in terms of financial gain or publicity. Any countermeasure must be commensurate with the perceived threat.
• We must make intrusion into both the hosting company's systems and the web application itself as difficult as possible.
• We want to make the system open and easy to use for legitimate users, but as the level of security is increased it becomes harder to use the system.