RSS
|
 Building E-Commerce
December 15, 1998 |
|
Hosting Revisited Ironically, this is where hosting an extranet server sometimes makes more sense. Typically, people view online selling as a side business to their core revenue stream. As such, they naturally view it as something that can be run off-site, under outside supervision and generally divorced from ìmainstreamî company activity. Once you delve into the mechanics of Web commerce, however, youíll quickly see that this activity will require just as much if not more immediate access to core company resources as any other corporate branch. Thatís when many people opt for internally housed and managed commerce servers. Extranets, on the other hand, are initially viewed in exactly the opposite manner. The definition of an extranet is simply an intranet with open access to a limited and screened set of business partners. In effect, youíre opening parts of your internal network to trusted business associates. As such, itís easy to see that ITís initial inclination is to house such servers where it can keep an eye on them. Often this strategy holds true, but just as often it doesnít. Thatís because the actual applications these servers share are wide open. What if it turns out youíre just sharing files, even if it is a large volume? And even if you are sharing database information, it very often makes sense to create a separate, shared database that then replicates select records to both you and your partners. In effect, extranet developers often create such a closed environment that it makes sense to run off-site. By opting to have these machines hosted, your development team is quickly given a base application framework within which to work--namely, the hardware, software and operating systems that the hosting service can support. Within that framework, theyíre free to develop whatever they want, while still neatly sidestepping thorny issues like hardware availability, archiving and security.
|
 |
 Print This Page E-mail this URL |
Best of the Web
Data deduplication: Declawing the clones
Data deduplication is emerging as a critically important new arrow in the storage administrator's quiver to answer hard questions about the increasing problem in storage growth costs.
Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows
One of the great ironies of storage technology is the inverse relationship between efficiency and security: Adding performance or reducing storage requirements almost always results in reducing the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a system.
WAN Optimization Whitelists and Blacklists
Optimization is a fantastic way of saving money and creating really happy customers at the same time, but it doesn't work flawlessly for all applications.
WAN Optimization as a Managed Service: It's Not About the Cost
This insight examines how organizations outsourcing their WAN optimization initiatives to a third-party go about achieving their goals for application performance, reducing operational costs, and streamlining enterprise infrastructure.
