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Dynamic Virtual Private Network
The growth of the Internet has revolutionized communication facilities.
Through years, more and more communication standards and facilities
emerged; e-mail and faxing direct from and to PC are examples. Now the
Internet has also crept into the world of business. It was there in the
business for years but was not directly involved with it.
In order to accommodate new, changing and expanding groups of users
and provide these users with information in a number of ways, intranets
should deliver several benefits, including flexibility, interoperability,
ease of use and extendibility. In particular, they should be open and and
standards based, so information can be read by different users with
different applications on different platforms.
However, the benefits promised by intranets lead to an important
challenge for businesses using this technology: how to establish and
maintain trust in an environment which was designed originally for free
and open access to information. The Internet was not designed with
business security in mind. It was designed by universities as an open
network where users could access, share and add to information as early as
possible. A way has to be found to secure an intranet for businesses
without impinging on the intranet’s inherent benefits of flexibility
interoperability and ease of use. Indeed, an ideal solution must also
provide not only the highest levels of security but also security in such
a way that users can easily access, modify and share more information, not
less, under carefully controlled and maintained conditions.
The most appropriate and successful answer to this challenge will
be a DYNAMIC VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORK. Unlike traditional VPNs that offer
limited or inflexible security, a dynamic VPN provides both extremely high
levels of security and, equally important, the flexibility to accommodate
dynamically changing groups of users and information needs. A dynamic VPN
is actually an intranet enabler. It enables an intranet to offer more
resources and services than it could otherwise, thereby allowing the
business to make more use of its information resources.
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