Making it secure
By PRASANNA RAMAN
28th March 2002 (Computimes)

ALTHOUGH the Internet promises more business opportunities for companies, putting the business on the Internet, however, brings forth issues that brick-and-mortar businesses have never quite faced before.

Among the concerns of conducting electronic commerce (e-commerce) are security, difficult site management, making the Internet friendly to users, managing high traffic, and having hassle-free links.

According to Netegrity, a US-based provider of solutions for managing user access to e-business Web sites, many existing Web sites focus on keeping people out of their sites, by which they maintain security. However, with a site that requires people to do transactions on the site, what they are allowed to do on the site must be controlled. This means, they should only be allowed to access applications and information that they have authority over.

Another area of concern is the putting of security enforcement codes in each application and how the codes can become unmanageable when the number of applications and its complexity increases.

Keeping users on the site without getting them to do multiple logons to different applications is another area of concern as such frustrations can mean lost business. E-business sites must also be able to support many users on high peak loads and allow for seamless links to affiliate sites.

Understanding the need for e-business sites to have a secure, scalable and reliable management infrastructure, Netegrity has launched a solution called SiteMinder that promises to address all of the problems in Web site management.

To help companies conduct secure e-business, MSC Trust gate.com, as part of its Internet Trust solutions, will offer the SiteMinder solution in its role as the local systems integration partner for Netegrity.

"Our people will use SiteMinder when they design and implement security solutions for our clients in combination with our licensed certification authority functions, public key infrastructure expertise, security integration consulting and systems integration experience," said MSC Trustgate's product and project manager Abel Ahing at the recent launch of SiteMinder in Cyberjaya.

"SiteMinder provides scalability to millions of users, deploys quickly and easily, providing a centralised, robust security management infrastructure, single sign-on and scalability to meet the high traffic requirements of e-business Web sites, giving Web administrators the flexibility to control member sites from 50 to 50 million users from a single management console," said Netegrity Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd's regional sales manager Michael Chin.

Implementation of SiteMinder, said Ahing, will take three to four weeks.