InformationWeek

September 14, 1998

Executive Report: Beyond Extranets

By Monua Janah

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he Internet has expanded far beyond its roots as a network for scientists and academics. As electronic commerce increases, more companies employ the Internet to transport business traffic. It can be more cost-effective to harness the public IP network than to use private networks and leased lines. However, despite its cost advantages, the Internet is not necessarily the ideal medium for commercial transactions.

IP is inherently a "best efforts" protocol-that is, it makes no promises that data will reach its destination or remain secure. There is no guarantee that enough bandwidth will be available to eliminate congestion on the Net. As more bandwidth becomes available, new applications that consume available resources emerge and, like Oliver Twist, ask for more.

chart To be sure, vendors have developed products and services designed to improve the security, reliability, and availability of IP networks-in other words, to customize the Internet for commercial use. Security products promise high-end encryption; virtual private networks offer secure pathways through the Internet; and various bandwidth-allocation tools tailor network resources for an application or a user group. Major vendors offer software for the setting of policies-or sets of rules governing bandwidth or security. Service-level agreements between a company and its provider permit different levels of network service at varying prices. A new generation of routers and switches provides enormous backbone capacity and can support several interfaces running at gigabit speeds.

Standards bodies, meanwhile, consider modifying or extending the core TCP/IP protocol so it can more easily accommodate the demands of business traffic and multimedia.

Notwithstanding these advances on the IP front, businesses struggle to use the Internet effectively. Indeed, network staffers complain that top managers are pressuring them to figure out this Internet thing, and to start getting intranets, extranets, and virtual private networks under way-fast.

It isn't easy. Arguably, there's no such thing as a secure extranet. And reliability is a big issue; big backbone routers still drop packets like crazy when the Net gets congested, and Windows NT Web servers have to be rebooted constantly. As for bandwidth, how do you provide enough? As soon as the very expensive T3 lines are in place-replacing T1 connections-behold, somebody dreams up some new Web project that's going to eat up that additional capacity.

In this climate of churn, ironically, the IT staff tends to believe that the old stuff wears the best. For critical traffic, the reliable and secure Systems Network Architecture-the traditional network standard linking mainframes and now used in a distributed computing milieu-is preferred over IP.

Are the traditionalists right? The beauty of the Internet, designed as a research network, lay in the simplicity and flexibility of its protocol. But that can be its problem, too. Now that all the businesses in the world are using it-or trying to-is the Net going to get slower and slower? Or will a new, layered Internet emerge that can meet the demands of heavy commercial traffic? In time, we'll know the answer.

Senior editor Monua Janah covers networking.

"Executive Report: IT Innovators"

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