With South African companies spreading their businesses geographically both nationally and internationally shared network infrastructures are now being embraced as a means of reducing the total cost of providing remote access to the ever-growing number of mobile workers and small branch sites wishing to connect to corporate LANs.
"Internet Virtual Private Networks [IVPNs] are playing an increasingly important role by facilitating fast, cost-effective connections between organisations and their business partners, suppliers and customers," says Martin May, regional director (sub-Saharan Africa) of Enterasys Networks.
"This is particularly important for many South African companies entering the e-business age and preparing to introduce e-commerce solutions."
May says IVPNs are becoming fundamental to enterprises in their efforts to achieve global reach and enable customer service any time, anywhere, anyhow in support of new e-business applications in the Internet economy.
"The Internet has become so ubiquitous and ISPs so numerous that it is now possible to obtain connections in all but the most remote locations.
"Local ISP connections can be provisioned using many technologies, from dial-up modem and ISDN links for small sites, to leased lines or Frame Relay for larger sites."
May says the IVPN is the only solution that can deliver the high levels of throughput, reliability, guaranteed services, traffic monitoring/reporting and accounting demanded by the emerging class of e-business entrepreneurs.
"Internet-based VPNs also allow greater flexibility when deploying mobile computing, telecommuting and branch office networking - all of which are in an explosive growth phase in South Africa."
According to May, IVPNs provide several benefits users including lower total cost of ownership and infrastructure investments. The Internet - an existing public infrastructure - is used as well as simplified wide area network (WAN) operations.
"Companies can roll-out a relatively large IVPN rapidly. It is particularly suited to companies with offices worldwide."
Looking to the future, May says that new emerging "last-mile" technologies such as xDSL, wireless and even satellite will soon be available and de-regulated to provide both low-cost and high-speed access to IVPNs.
He adds that many local ISPs and service providers are now starting to support these new (to South Africa) technologies for Internet access, targeting home users and SOHO sites for future connection.
"As the telecommunications arena becomes deregulated, South African consumers will be given access to an ever-increasing array of cheaper options for last-mile connections.
"In the future, IVPN users will have the flexibility to migrate from private WAN to VPN services according to specific requirements and to take advantage of lower equipment costs by integrating VPN gateways and routing capabilities into a single device."
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A Virtual Private Network
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a network that uses the Internet or other network service as its Wide Area Network backbone. In a VPN, dial-up connections to remote users, and leased line or Frame Relay connections to remote sites, are replaced by local connections to an Internet service provider (ISP) or other service provider`s point of presence (POP).
A VPN allows a private intranet to be securely extended across the Internet or other network service, facilitating secure e-commerce and extranet connections with business partners, suppliers and customers. There are three main types of VPN:
Intranet VPNs (IVPNs) allow private networks to be securely extended across the Internet or other public network service, and are sometimes referred to as site-to-site or LAN-to-LAN VPNs.
Remote Access VPNs, also referred to as dial-up VPNs, allow individual dial-up users to connect to a central site across the Internet or other public network service in a secure way.
Extranet VPNs , an extension of Intranet VPNs with the addition of firewalls to protect the internal network, allow secure connections with business partners, suppliers and customers for the purpose of e-commerce.
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