The firm, soon to launch a new product in Singapore, has warned that supplementing firewalls with proxies, prevention systems, URL filtering and other costly and complex devices is "ineffective in today's application and threat landscape".

In a recent a study of 900,000 users, Palo Alto found that 100 per cent of the organisations surveyed had firewalls and 87 per cent also had one or more firewall helpers (for example, a proxy, an IPS, URL filtering)--yet they were unable to exercise control over the application traffic traversing the network.

Other worrying findings were that:

• Applications are built for accessibility--57 per cent can bypass security infrastructure (for example, Microsoft SharePoint, Apple Update, and so on);