This is a pretty article that discusses why IPSec is slow going, and how now vendors are starting to work together to make sure their products interoperate when building a VPN. "As the number of VPN gateways increases, so does the . . .
This is a pretty article that discusses why IPSec is slow going, and how now vendors are starting to work together to make sure their products interoperate when building a VPN. "As the number of VPN gateways increases, so does the need for smart, robust, centralized management, because you don't want to increase your workload proportionally. There is some help on the way. As the VPN becomes more critical to your operations, many vendors are adding support for integration and high-availability features that let the gateway leverage existing services for authentication, configuration and logging. Leveraging existing services should reduce much of the management overhead.

In addition to the management hurdles, configuring a VPN using equipment from multiple vendors is gnarly. At this point, support for IPsec (IP Security) interoperability isn't making much difference. The IPsec protocol suite has been in RFC status in the IETF since 1998, and the IPsec vendors-through bake-offs and the ICSA (www.icsa.net)-have shown interoperability among shipping products. Since that time, the number of vendors offering IPsec VPNs has dramatically increased, especially in software-only implementations. Hardware-based IPsec VPN providers have consolidated. This has left two long-standing vendors-RedCreek Communications and VPNet Technologies-contending with large companies like Alcatel, Cisco Systems, Intel Corp. and Lucent Technologies. The next big obstacle for these vendors to overcome is interoperable IPsec with the use of digital certificates. Maybe next year. "

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