Protect client privacy over the miles - Company Business and Marketing

Communications News, March, 2001

DSL secures an office-to-office-to-office connection.

PFG Mortgage Services (PFG) needed a fast Internet connection. The six users employed at the full service mortgage company had been sharing a dial-up connection to the Internet. The company's Web server was hosted off-site by its ISP, and the modem link, although slow, served its needs for a while.

Like many small businesses these days, those needs shifted when the company--headquartered in Lake Forrest, IL--opened a branch office in Scottsdale, AZ. This presented a couple of new challenges. First, the data that needed to be transferred between offices was often sensitive financial information. Proper security was a main concern for PFG, its investors and its customers.

Second, much of the client data in Lake Forrest is kept in a specialized mortgage application. With just three nodes in the Scottsdale office, the company wanted to avoid the cost of installing and maintaining a second database server in Scottsdale, and the hassle of synchronizing both data sets. The firm needed a secure, high-speed interstate link between the two offices. Whatever solution was implemented also needed to scale easily to accommodate a future office PFG planned to open in Florida.

That is when Russ Sher, PFG's computer and network consultant from NetworkTek, did some research. A dedicated lease line or privately owned communication channel between the two offices would be too expensive. Sher decided to set up a virtual private network (VPN) between the two sites, using the Internet as a backbone.

VPN ECONOMIES OF SCALE

A VPN can enjoy the security of a private network through access controls and encryption. It can also take advantage of the economies of scale and built-in management facilities of a large public network like the Internet.

Sher then asked, "What's the best way to connect these offices to the Internet?" If the Scottsdale users were going to share the database server with Lake Forrest employees, the connection would have to be faster than a modem--and it would have to remain connected all day.

At first, Sher considered implementing an ISDN connection at both sites. An ISDN connection would cost approximately $10,000 per year. That would climb to around $15,000, once the Florida office was operating. Besides, even if PFG combined both B channels of the ISDN interface, the total data rate would be only 128 kbps. Sher was not sure that level of performance would sustain the traffic of the database application Scottsdale employees would have to run from the Lake Forrest server.

He started looking at other options, including digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, and found that DSL provides an always-on connection without per-minute charges. The cost of a DSL connection was only $2,736 per year for both sites. DSL performance looked better, too. The lines from the local telephone company's central office (CO) to PFG qualified for data transfer speeds of up to 192 kbps.

SETTING UP THE VPN

The next step for Sher was to select an ISP that would support DSL service in both locations. For that, PFG turned to Flashcom Inc., a national provider of broadband communications services. As part of the installation in Lake Forrest, Flashcom installed a DSLrouter made by FlowPoint (later acquired by Efficient Networks).

The real test of the new technology, however, came when the company opened its Scottsdale office. A test of the phone lines to see if they would support DSL found that they only supported speeds up to 144 kbps--although that is still five times faster than a 28.8 kbps modem and somewhat faster than an ISDN line would have been. DSL connection speeds are linked to the distance between the customer and the telephone company's central office--the closer a business is to the CO, the faster the transmission speeds.

Efficient's VPN solution uses Layer 2 tunneling protocol to create a LAN-to-LAN communications link called a tunnel (a virtual path). Once connected, the router treats the tunnel as a point-to-point link.

PFG did not need to install any additional hardware on its LAN or additional software on its Dell workstations. It did need to purchase a key to unlock the secure VPN option on the routers to provide transparent and simultaneous private access to the Forrest Hill network using the Internet.

Now, the company has a network that spans across the country. Employees in the Scottsdale office run a database application from the server in Forrest Hills; and they securely transfer files like spreadsheets and disclosures. With a DSL-secure VPN, PFG Mortgage rests assured that private communications to remote offices remain private.

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