Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

This is a vitally interesting question to me, and the answer to it, plus the timeliness of the response to the issue, will have a great impact on the way we use our computers in the future. Current common business applications, programs such as word processors, spreadsheets, accounting software, and graphics packages, are written in high level languages and run on your workstation.

These high level programming languages have all the bells and whistles, plus another important feature: they are up close and personal to the hardware that comprises your workstation. The programs produced by these languages are intimately connected to your hardware. Because they run on your hardware, most (but not all) security concerns are fairly minor.

It is apparent to most of us that we are trying to shift much of the burden of running business software onto platforms other than our workstations, especially remote servers. We want to use cloud computing or Software as a Service (SaaS), or some similar paradigm in the future, for a number of very valid reasons. In short, we want to run our apps on the web.

My question is, are the languages used to program Web applications up to this task. Can C#, Ruby on Rails, Java, Ajax, PHP and the other Web languages write programs that can run on a detached server, still communicate intimately with our local hardware, and do all that with no greater security risks than we face today? I've been in the business of producing application software for 30 years and I'm not sure that I know the answer.

What do you think?