Despite the growth of IP-VPN capabilities too little attention has been paid to date to other key enterprise trends such as the increasing use of other virtual services and the growing use of enterprise directories.
As the nature and number of relationships between the enterprise and the service provider becomes more complex, and the content of IP-VPN services becomes more feature-rich, new approaches are required. Organizations face a choice of either maintaining application/service-specific mechanisms or adopting a centralized approach exploiting technology such as directories more widely. These trends are discussed and a potential way forward outlined which puts the end-user at the heart of the issue.
The Growing Use of IP-VPNs
Over recent years there has been a great deal of activity in the area of IP-based VPNs. There have been two base approaches taken to provide virtual IP networking capabilities over a common backbone. Although there is no commonly accepted terminology for these two approaches, this paper will refer to them as 'closed-platform'-and 'Internet'-based VPNs.
Closed platform VPNs follow in the long tradition of virtual networking over the last 20 years. There is an historic wave of VPN deployment that has covered voice services,