Advanced IP services: Off the starting block - Technology Information

Communications News, August, 2000 by Tony Tomae

While enterprises of all shapes and sizes have embraced the strategic need for IP-VPNs, to date, most initiatives have been toe-in-the-water dial-up remote access applications. Few have taken the plunge into integrated IP-VPNs, which include site-to-site intranet, extranets and public Internet access. Now that the two key safety nets--security and performance--are finally meshing, enterprises are stepping up their implementations.

While the advantages of globally available, always-accessible IP services have long been recognized by the enterprise, widespread adoption of IP-VPNs has been held back by legitimate security and performance concerns. Specifically, many enterprises have been wary of abandoning the strict security and high performance they now receive with dedicated PVCs in their Layer 2 (i.e., frame relay and ATM) networks for what has traditionally been considered an unpredictable, unstable public Internet service.

That was yesterday's IP. With recent advances in security and performance mechanisms, today's IP, properly implemented, can leapfrog its Layer 2 counterparts. On the security front, IPSec is now mature enough to provide standards-based secure tunnel mechanisms above and beyond the first-generation dialup-centric L2F (layer 2 forwarding)/PPTP (point-to-point tunneling protocol)/L2TP (layer 2 tunneling protocol) approaches.

Alan Armentrout, director of information technology at Anchor Pharmacies, Inc., in Hampstead, MD, notes these security advances as particularly crucial. As a retail pharmacy chain utilizing IP services to provide dedicated intranet connectivity between a nationwide network of community pharmacies, Anchor needs to guarantee that sensitive customer data and corporate information is strictly secured. Armentrout stresses how important this security is, "Being in the medical field, we were very concerned about security. We absolutely needed a highly secured environment to ensure our data was protected from point to point."

The real innovation is now taking place on the performance front. Emerging class of service (COS) mechanisms like DiffServ and MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) are enabling application-aware networking--here network resources are allocated to traffic flows according to their importance or delay sensitivity.

Just ask John Dill, CEO and chairman of QuantumCast.net, Inc., Richland, MI, a "dot-net" startup company bringing convergent Internet to business and resident subscribers. One of the first in the industry to really take advantage of COS-enabled IP services for a real-world application, Dill emphasizes the importance of application-aware networking for his groundbreaking long-distance voice over IP (VoIP) services, saying, "I've worked in the communication business for many years, and you absolutely need to provide guaranteed quality or you simply don't have a service. Without application-aware packet prioritization, you just cannot provide the proper quality for VoIP calls or QCIP, as we call it."

In simple terms, what these security and performance advances mean is that IP services can satisfy enterprise demand for a converged fabric that can stand up to mission-critical requirements. What are those requirements? First, enterprises today are virtual--interacting with a dizzying array of new employees, partners and suppliers. Because of this, they want instant, secure access to crucial people, applications, and information inside and outside traditional corporate boundaries. That's exactly what Armentrout was looking for.

"We believe that IP is the communication vehicle for the future and, beyond allowing us to expand to apps like VoIP and videoconferencing, it was the most practical method for providing quick and secure access to our stores all over the country. Now, we use our intranet service to communicate policies and procedures, sales numbers, product specials, company newsletters and transaction level data--eliminating the need for back-and-forth faxes and long-distance calls."

Secondly, enterprises are now seeking to harness the power of Internet technologies for more than just e-mail and e-commerce. They want it for end-to-end e-business applications. Using powerful tools like electronic customer relationship management (eCRM) to pull precise customer-specific details from Web transactions and making them instantly available to marketing for one-to-one campaigns, they gain an edge on the competition. Taking this personalized customer information and tying it back to their order fulfillment applications (i.e., service access point or SAP), business-to-business extranet supply chains can generate exact customer orders, benefiting their customers and giving their product development teams the ability to rapidly roll out the right products.

Finally, enterprises are also looking to take advantage of powerful, next-generation converged content, application and communication tools like unified messaging, click-to-talk Web sites and shared e-whiteboarding to boost productivity and provide superior customer experience.