The business communities of today have realized that in addition to traditional sources of value, such as cash and equipment, there is now an equally important source of value in knowledge and information.
"Traditionally, this information has been protected by firewalls and virus protection - or, safeguarded from threats from outside the enterprise. However, studies have shown that security violations are far more likely to come from inside the enterprise than from without," notes Darryl Squara, business manager for Intel at Tarsus Technologies, the distribution arm of JSE-listed MB Technologies.
With this understanding, the networks of the future must be secured from both internal and external attack. "Security within the corporate LAN is becoming a major issue demanding attention from management," continues Squara. He reveals that Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) is rapidly emerging as the LAN security protocol of choice.
Defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the proven IPSec specification has already been used extensively to enable Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) on the Internet. "The technology is now being applied successfully to encrypt and protect LAN communications," says Squara.
"While providing superb LAN security, IPSec nevertheless drives CPU utilisation up on the workstation as well as the server. When implemented on a Fast Ethernet network server, for instance, IPSec uses so much processing power that the effective bandwidth of the server can drop from 100Mb to 20Mb," says Squara. To counteract this, Intel has offloaded the encryption function onto the Network Interface Card (NIC), allowing a secure LAN without adverse network performance.
With the ever-increasing value of corporate data, security is emerging as one of the pivotal issues in networking and Internet communications. "LAN-level data protection, enabled by IPSec, is clearly a prerequisite for secure communications in today`s environment," concludes Squara.
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