Mission-Critical Applications and the Public Internet
Author: RobMetras Total views: 13 Word Count: 555
Over the past 15 years or more, businesses have experienced the trend of driving operational computing and communications down. The trend has been do more with less $. The recent drop in Computer hardware pricing over the past 5 years has fueled this reduction even further. Now every business can have an enterprise quality computing environment and telecommunications solution that is better than what most Fortune 100 companies ran their business on 10 years ago for a fraction of the investment. In addition to this with the proliferation of high speed internet at extremely low monthly fees the attraction of utilizing the internet to run business application over the internet has been huge. This has further fueled the cost savings for organizations around the globe
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.
Time sensitive applications such as voice may suffer from your connectivity when net enabled. The quality of line required for specific applications may not be the same and you could be at risk of packet loss and dropped connections. Always delpoy mission critical applications with a backup point of entry and exit to the public networks and other connections. Sometimes a point to point connection can provide the best choice over comlete internet connectivity.
Not every internet connection is created equally, even from the same provider. Cost savings in one area, may need to be re-invested in to new areas to allow the organization to do more with less but with multiple options for our security and access.
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