Industry announcements enhance VPN and VPN management services

The first such event occurred with the rollout of what it termed "E-VPN Services" by Cisco. Previously lagging its competitors in broad based VPN product support, Cisco chose to wait on its full VPN rollout until it felt that it had all the required pieces in place. The salient features in the Cisco announcement included VPN-enabled remote and central site routers through protocol, infrastructure and manageability extensions to IOS, support for IPSec performance acceleration through add-on modules for the Cisco 7500 and 7200 family, as well as firewall feature set extensions and VPN performance monitoring support that is intended to facilitate the implementation of in-house Service Level Agreements (SLA) for enterprise VPN services.

Cisco's focus on enterprise VPN support vs. service provider VPN support is particularly key. This appears to indicate that Cisco believes that enterprise-managed site-to-site VPN services will be favored to support the initial rollout of extranet and e-commerce services. Therefore it has chosen to focus its efforts on delivering the hardware and software extensions to its router family that are likely to play best within corporate networks. These extensions are designed to address key enterprise connectivity and security requirements on the one hand while using the Internet as nothing more than a managed set of circuit services on the other.

Another key announcement came from Network Associates. It announced a new version of its popular Gauntlet VPN product at the annual RSA Security Conference in San Jose. The primary value-add of this new release is a broad set of Triple A and encryption key exchange services that are compatible with the VPN network transport and security systems of vendors other than Network Associates. The vendors that are compatible include Entrust, Time Step, Microsoft, CheckPoint, Cisco, IBM, Internet Dynamics and Information Resource Engineering (IRE). Gauntlet VPN server also provides support for DES, Triple-DES and CAST encryption as well as secondary authentication standards such as SecureID, Radius, Skey and Windows NT domain authentication. The primary objective is to offer network managers a better mousetrap for VPN implementation by making installed product compatibility far less of an issue than it has previously been.

The third key event was the planned acquisition of Ascend by Lucent. Much has been printed regarding exactly why Lucent chose to acquire Ascend, but without question one of the key reasons for this merger was the value of the mature VPN hardware, software and management products that Ascend had and that Lucent did not. Clearly, Lucent determined that 1999 was the year for VPN implementations to become seriously jump-started. Therefore, in order to play in this market by credibly providing users with a viable alternative, acquisition of a credible established player was the only viable option. Lucent's value is its growing brand recognition with enterprise network managers as a viable alternative to either Cisco or Nortel Networks. Therefore, the combination of the Lucent brand name with the strong base hardware and management software of Ascend should serve to make the Ascend products more viable to enterprise users than they had previously been.

Taken together, these events collectively show the importance of VPNs and VPN management to many of the largest players in the industry. Over the past few years, VPNs often meant investing in small vendors and becoming locked into proprietary hardware and software. However, given the importance of VPN extranet services to the successful implementation of business to business e-commerce, the time had come for the major players to more assertively establish themselves, which is exactly what is happening now. The result for users should be greater confidence in enterprise VPN deployment and greater choice for the extranet and e-commerce infrastructure over the course of the next two years.