Security manufacturers increasingly refer to their solutions as a platform, with the vague implication that this gives their technology a distinct advantage. The challenge, of course, is that the term platform is rather ambiguous. It simply refers to the environment in which a piece of software is executed. It can refer to the hardware it is installed on, the operating system (OS) that runs it, or even a web browser loaded with specific APIs to execute the program code. As a result, the term often isn’t really all that useful when you are shopping for a security solution.
