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eBusiness Developer Requirements
Developers of corporate e-business systems place exacting requirements on the technology they
use to build the e-business environment, and with good reason. These developers
are under intense pressure to get systems up and running quickly, as well as to
accommodate changing requirements. This means that the e-business security
infrastructure must satisfy specific needs for speed of deployment,
flexibility, scalability, and manageability.
Speed of Deployment:
Typically, developers of e-business systems are under tremendous pressure to get
applications online quickly. For example, a supply-chain application may be
immediately needed to cut inventory costs and keep the company competitive as
its industry moves to supply-chain integration.
Flexibility:
The development pressure often does not go away once the initial version is up and
running. The rapidly evolving nature of e-business means that requirements are
also changing rapidly. As a result, new pressures mount to add more
capabilities. Solutions must be flexible enough to support this pace of change.
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Scalability:
As some organizations have found, it is extremely difficult to predict the demand
for e-business applications. Applications may have to handle sharp spikes in
demand, or overall use that rapidly accelerates to unexpected levels—perhaps
even millions of users. To avoid a potentially disastrous inability to meet
user expectations, it’s important to look for solutions that will scale
smoothly.
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Manageability:
An ecommerce solution should increase business efficiency—not create additional
administrative burdens. A security solution should be easily managed, and
remain so as it grows to support the organization’s expanding e-business
environment.
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Support for Pervasive Computing:
An e-business application and its security infrastructure must be able to handle
user access “any time, from anywhere.” Over the next few years companies will
expect to be able to access systems with non-traditional clients, like wireless
thin client handheld devices, which are beginning to proliferate worldwide.
Market-research firm IDC estimates that the number of mobile Internet users
worldwide is growing at a compound rate of more than 100% a year, and will
reach more than 500 million by 2004.
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Businesses must plan their e-business security approaches to provide the maximum
flexibility in accommodating current and future generations of these wireless
devices. One approach is to channel all access, whether from mobile or desktop
devices, through the same security infrastructure. This means that users can
get exactly the same access rights no matter whether they are accessing systems
from a desktop or mobile device. This approach also reduces the development
effort because it avoids the need to build a separate security infrastructure
to handle a wireless population that may grow to tens of thousands of handheld machines.
These devices are handled by the scalable, reliable infrastructure that is
already in place, and if security policies change the changes are automatically
applied to all devices. To ensure that e-business systems are flexible enough
to support this approach, businesses need to look for products that are being
extended to embrace wireless access. Enterprise e-business security technology
should be able to work with standards-based Wireless Access Protocol gateways,
so that incoming access requests from wireless networks are directed to the
existing enterprise security infrastructure, where users can be authenticated
and authorized. Businesses also should ensure that the security infrastructure
is extremely scalable. Typically, the requirement to support wireless access
involves adding large numbers of new devices to the environment, and the
infrastructure must be able to handle it.
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