Can You Trust the Internet for Critical Applications
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by: JeffBrodie
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Word Count: 553
Today the internet is relied on for every type of business transaction that you can think of through to credit processing between businesses and banking institutions. Yes the internet is an infrastructure that hold the veritable panacea of applications for one low price per month. I can run Virtual Private Network (VPNs) over the internet. I can run my corporate web site on the internet or access my CRM (Customer Relations Management) application. Backup is possible over the net for my mission critical sensitive data to offsite vaults to protect my business. My email communications, fax communications, voice communications and video communications are all running over the public internet. Post and courier services no longer carry messages and data to remote locations when we can simply transfer gigabytes of data across the public internet.
The internet provides immense opportunity, security not withstanding. With the cost of entry being small the growth of internet interaction has accelerated between individuals either through instant messaging or socialnetworking. Indeed a number of subscribers of Skype are making free net calls al over the world.
So where is the challenge to deploying mission critical applications over the internet at large? Well one of the areas is if that application has real time, time sensitive data like voice and video you will soon learn that not all internet connections are created equally. I am not just talking about different types of internet connections, but the same type of internet connections at different locations. This is due to the difference in infrastructure (The age of the cable in the ground). Organizations that widely deploy mission critical applications over the internet must take into consideration the variance in the quality of the internet connections at various locations and with various carriers.
Voice cannot experience packet loss or dropped connections. Whereas Web browsing, email, crm, file transfer and backup applications can rely on an unreliable internet connection as long as the connection is mostly stable. The key to understand is that if the internet drops the connections even if it is for 2 seconds all of your time sensitive communications could be dropped. Time sensitive applications include telephone call and web conferencing. So when deploying these types of services broadly it is important to have in your plan a contingency plan that says we may need to try different service providers and different technologies for our internet last mile as we deploy our solution out to the field. It may also be important to move some of these applications back to point-to-point connections to ensure the high quality of these services.
All connections are not created equal, even from the same carrier or supplier. You must reinvest the savings you get in one area with technology to give you better options for access and security
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