Newcomer Boosts Network Security

At a time when network and IT security is of increasing concern, a new company debuted Monday with a family of IP-based virtual-private-network services that are less expensive than dedicated data services and more secure than the public Internet.

Virtela Communications Inc. unveiled itself and its service Monday, even though it is over a year-and-a-half old and has some customers that are more than a year old.

Virtela uses multiple IP backbone networks as the main transport mechanism for its services, helping to keep down the cost of the services. It adds intelligence to the services at its points of presence with its IP Services Fabric concept, which lets Virtela offer such features as firewalls, encryption, policy management, and user authentication.

Virtela has 700 points of presence in the United States, as well as 4,500 dedicated points of presence and 6,000 dial-up points of presence internationally, according to Virtela. The points of presence serve as gateways to the service, and customers can access them using virtually any kind of network service or technology--public or private--including private lines, frame relay, asynchronous transfer mode, dial-up, digital subscriber line, wireless, cable modem, or Ethernet.

Virtela offers VPN, security, IP-based video transport, voice-over-IP, and professional services, as well as VirtelaView network monitoring and management.

VPN services include network-enabled VPNs, customer premises equipment-based VPNs, and VPNs for intranets, extranets, and remote users. Security services include a network-based managed firewall service, a managed hardware-based firewall service, and an authentication service.

The managed VPN service is easier to set up and operate than it would have been to design and install a VPN in-house, and it's significantly cheaper than using a dedicated data service such as frame relay, says Virtela customer Dave Heafey, IT manager at Winphoria Networks Inc., in Tewksbury, Mass. Winphoria uses Virtela's VPN service to connect its Boston-area headquarters to two overseas engineering facilities, in Bangalore, India, and Madrid, says Heafey.

Because traffic on the Virtela VPN is encrypted, "I'm very confident that it's a secure circuit, and that was a primary factor in the decision," Heafey says. "In general, if you're doing things over the Internet without encryption, you could be in trouble."