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VisionTek Farms Out Security Operations July 12, 1999 By Kelly Jackson Higgins First it was the managed firewall service. Now there's the security utility service. VisionTek, a manufacturer of memory and video boards, outsources most of its security infrastructure and operation. Earlier this year with the outsourcing in place, VisionTek felt safe bringing its off-site Web server back in-house and using it to run an interactive application for the company's business partners and prospective customers. "All we had on our Web site before were static HTML pages about the company and its products," says Dan Rich, director of information systems for VisionTek, Gurnee, Ill. "There was nothing sensitive or interactive." It was too risky for VisionTek to run any real-time applications on the Web site when it was hosted by an ISP. "I'm uncomfortable with running a Web application at an ISP and having to connect over the Internet to that ISP to transfer data or have a real-time database," says John Kehoe, senior networking consultant for VisionTek. And updating was complicated, requiring massive FTPing of files over the Internet to the database--it took two days per week just to update pages on the remote Web site. With the real-time database and Web server in-house, VisionTek now runs a custom e-commerce application, called Voltage, from the site. Voltage lets those OEMs and prospective buyers of VisionTek memory products visiting www. VisionTek.com determine how much memory their PCs need and which of VisionTek's products to use. VisionTek also recently integrated the application into the Web sites of some of its key resellers. "That gives them a link from their e-commerce pages directly to Voltage for configuration information," Rich says. "We also have created pages on our site for our resellers' large customers to identify our products and get pricing and availability [information]." Pilot Network Services provides VisionTek's security infrastructure and around-the-clock policing and security support. There's no equipment on VisionTek's end, as there would be with a typical firewall service. Instead, Pilot provides a dedicated, secure T1 pipe from a Cisco Systems router at VisionTek's site to Pilot's own IP-based network, which serves as VisionTek's secure Internet backbone. Pilot filters Internet traffic for VisionTek, determining which users can access what on VisionTek's servers; it also scans e-mail for viruses. VisionTek, meanwhile, handles the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption for its Web servers. Behind the scenes, Pilot's heuristic database "learns" about different security breaches and vulnerabilities, and automatically adjusts and places the appropriate "locks"--in the form of antivirus tools or shutdown of denial-of-service attacks, for instance. And its security staff constantly monitors VisionTek's e-mail and Internet traffic. The only drawback to VisionTek's outsourcing strategy is that the company has to alert Pilot's network staff of any adds or changes in access to its Web and database servers, for instance, and this means an extra step. "There's a little trade-off in timeliness," Rich says. "But it's more than worth it not having to worry about [securing] the network."
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