Office gets wired to home with new technology

SSL technology-based networks set to grow ten-fold.

Security of transportation of data through the internet has always been a major cause of worry for companies and organisations. Due to privacy reasons, information stored in an organisation's server was unaccessible even to its employees from off-site locations.

Different cryptographic protocols have been developed but Indian organisations have been shying away from using them due to the high costs of such softwares.

Now, a new technology promises to make it easier for employees or customers to log on to an organisation's office computers from anywhere in the world using the Internet.

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) technology-based networks, increasingly becoming popular in sectors including e-commerce, education and retail, is expected to increase its quarterly sales by more than ten times to nearly $3 million by the year-end.

According to a previous report by Frost and Sullivan, the use of this technology had increased by around 3.5 times during the second quarter of this year alone.

"The growth is largely owing to ease in deployment and the low cost of maintaining these networks," says Sugata Sanyal, senior director for Content Security at SonicWALL, one of the biggest players in network security.

Largely the domain of IT majors and banking companies, Sanyal believes working from home will increasingly become common as more companies adopt systems based on SSL technology.

"Now, with the entire yearly ownership costs starting at a few lakh rupees, smaller organisations such as research institutes and hospitals can allow their resources to be shared by almost anyone with an ID and a password and an internet connection," Sanyal added.

This is in contrast to the earlier times when remote users could log on only from specifically 'sanitised' computers "" computers which had a client program installed and whose own network did not clash with the remote one.

"The biggest drawback with the old technology was the need to have such a high level of access to user's computer, which is not always possible. Most of the software required that the user's computer should have the same software installed on it. IP Sec based mechanisms frequently ran into problems like the user's firewall, for instance. In all, the procedure very complicated and having dedicated software at both ends pushed up the maintenance costs by as much as three times when compared to the new one'', Sanyal pointed out.

The new technology, based on a shift in encryption technology involving the use of publicly transportable encryption-algorithms (keys,) does away with the need for the client computer and the host computer to possess the same key.

While older technologies for sending data securely over the internet depended on a specially installed programme on the remote computer to encrypt data according to a pre-determined algorithm, the new one works by sending a new encryption method every-time a user logs on.

"With this, you do not need a special client programme, which had its own secret way of encrypting data... all you need is a simple client like the Internet Explorer or an FTP program. You can type the web-address of your office firewall and log in by entering a username and a password and go through your office files, emails and even applications and internal websites," Sanyal said.

The new technology, expected to double its market-size next year from this year's $ 300 million, with growth rate in India poised to be higher due to the high price-sensitivity of the market.

Besides being cheaper and making it possible to log in from virtually any machine with an internet connection, the technology also supports multi-layering and grouping of remote-users.

The technology, currently used extensively in e-banking and e-commerce in India, is expected to be deployed more and more by companies, especially those in the IT sector, to enable their employees to work from non work-sites.