InfoWorld: VPNs are a relatively new technology. What standards are important in
this area?
Nguyen: There are definitely two camps of thought in the industry. People who just
use IP as their protocol will probably look at IPsec [IP security] as the standard for
VPNs. There are, however, a lot of people interested in using the Layer 2 tunneling,
which is L2TP [Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol] and PPTP [Point to Point Tunneling
Protocol] in order to support situations like multiprotocol support, legacy-protocol
support, like IPX. And basically, both camps have their valid points. IPsec has the
advantage that it offers much stronger encryption and authentication. Both L2TP and
IPsec are in the standards track on the IETF RFC [Internet Engineering Task Force
Request for Comment] database. We look forward to working with industry
consortia such as the Auto Industry Action Group that are driving the IPsec standard
to completion, and we hope that there will be a quick adoption of the standards, both
in products and in terms of infrastructure that supports those products.
InfoWorld: Which standards does AT&T support?
Nguyen: At the moment, we do dynamic packet-filtering technology based on
trusted address space or protected address space. Packet filtering is a technology
that's used by firewalls, for example, and it's supported on all routers. We've taken
packet filtering to the next level by doing packet filtering with a protective address
space.
Over time, during the first quarter next year, we will be introducing our first Layer 2
tunneling capability, based on the [L2TP] protocol. And by the third quarter to fourth
quarter next year, L2TP and PPTP will become more prevalent and we will be
supporting them in terms of managing that capability from an end-to-end
perspective for customers. But we are also looking forward to [supporting] Layer 3
tunneling via IPsec.
We're glad to see those emerging standards and we're glad to see that we can take
those technologies and solve customers' problems. And our challenge is to keep up
with that.
InfoWorld: What other enhancements are planned?
Nguyen: We're going to offer certificate management, both in terms of certificate
authority, and also certificate management and distribution across our directory
services to standard LDAP [Lightweight Directory Access Protocol] directory
services.
Grey: We'll also be offering quality of service guarantees, different classes of
service, and more guaranteed bandwidth.
One of the key things that's growing are the applications. They're just demanding
more and more bandwidth, so we'll be able to provide that at the edge of the
network, and we'll be able to guarantee that across the network. One of the things
we'll be doing with our customer base next year is giving you software-based tools
where you can provision your own service in real time. What customers want to get
to is real-time self-provisioning as a service. |
