Based
on internet technology, intranets are becoming an essential part of corporate
information systems today. However, internets were not originally designed with
businesses in mind. It lacks the technology required for secure business transactions
and communications. A challenge therefore arises for businesses with intranet,
i.e. how to establish and maintain trust in an environment which was originally
designed for open access to information. More specifically, a way has to be found
to secure an intranet without impinging on its inherent benefits of flexibility,
interoperability and ease of use.Unlike
traditional VPNs that offer limited or inflexible security, a dynamic VPN provide
both high levels of security and, equally important, the flexibility to accommodate
dynamically changing groups of users and information needs. Our dynamic VPN can
provide this flexibility based on a unique agent-based architecture as well as
other features.Because information
can now be made available in such a flexible and fine-grained fashion, a company's
files, documents or data that had to locked in the past can now be accessed in
either whole or in part to carefully selected groups of users in precisely determined
ways. As a result, a dynamic VPN is an intranet enabler.
It enables an intranet
to offer more services and services than it could otherwise, thereby allowing
the business to make more use of its information resources.In
order to accommodate new, changing and expanding groups of users and provide these
users with information in a number of ways, intranets should deliver several benefits,
including flexibility, interoperability, ease of use and extendibility. In particular,
they should be open and and standards based, so information can be read by different
users with different applications on different platforms.However,
the benefits promised by intranets lead to an important challenge for businesses
using this technology: how to establish and maintain trust in an environment which
was designed originally for free and open access to information.
