NEW YORK-The boundaries between internal and external computer networks are disappearing due to the warp-speed incursion of the Internet, raising security concerns within enterprises that want to exploit this promising opportunity safely.
“Security is one of the inhibitors. It has been and always will be an issue,” said James Barksdale, chairman and chief executive officer of Netscape Communications Corp., last week at Warburg Dillon Read L.L.C.’s “Information Security and Electronic Commerce Conference.”
“There (also) is fraud in the credit-card and cellular telephone industries that will never be solved, but it can be contained. That’s good news for the 70 percent of the people who say they will buy things over the Internet,” added Barksdale.
Even more important than making money in the short run, the purpose of a business is to retain customers for future sales, he said. The Internet can be a terrific means to achieve that goal, and one such success story is the experience of Hongkong Telecom.
“Hongkong Telecom was deregulated in 1995, and all of a sudden this staid old company had six new well-financed competitors,” said Barksdale, formerly chief executive officer of AT&T Wireless Services Inc.
As a market differentiator and a means to develop ongoing contact with and knowledge about its customers, the carrier “started online bill presentment so its customers could pay telephone and utility bills,” he said.
Barbarians at the gate-a gate which is crumbling-represent the downside of this opportunity revolution, said Deborah Triant Reiman, president and chief executive officer of Check Point Software Technologies Inc., Redwood City, Calif.
Check Point provides enterprise security and traffic management solutions to customers that include “just about every major telecommunications carrier in the world,” including AT&T Corp., Sprint Corp., British Telecommunications plc, Deutsche Telekom and NTT DoCoMo, she said.
It also has an original equipment manufacturer relationship with Nokia Corp., which is supplying hardware incorporating Check Point’s software, to provide security in virtual private networks, she said. Virtual private networks allow data to be transmitted over public networks, like the Internet, by encrypting the data before transmission.
With Internet Protocol moving down to the desktop-computer level, the differentiation between internal and external networks is disappearing, she said.
“The security requirements to manage this are escalating. It’s not just protecting borders because there are no borders anymore,” Reiman said.
“You must control traffic on a real-time basis. The first manifestation of this change is that network security must be implemented by the network itself, not by human intervention: the kind of traffic allowed, whether encrypted or not, authentication of users and scanning for viruses.”
Keeping the enterprise secure is a critical enabler for the conduct of e-business, which “is no longer a competitive advantage but a necessity,” said Arthur Coviello, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Security Dynamics Technologies Inc., Bedford, Mass. The company develops and provides software and hardware to secure computer-based information resources. Its customers include 65 of the world’s 100 largest companies, he said.
“What drives the security market today is that most companies are becoming virtual companies, outsourcing non-core competencies,” Coviello said.
“The Internet pulls the order and delivery process together in supply chain management.”
Coviello noted two developments under way should accelerate this trend. First, a new generation of inexpensive, high-speed IP-ready network capacity offerings is “coming online.”
Second, Public Key Information, or PKI, “is emerging as a common architectural foundation for multiple security applications … and can be used with smart cards,” he said.
