An extranet enables corporations to share their enterprise resources with key individuals such as business partners, suppliers, customers, and consultants. According to a recent report from Forrester Research, more than half of the Fortune 1,000 are using extranets today and companies that are not deploying extranets, they are holding off on their deployments because of security concerns. Also, extranets usually require that corporations share information among heterogeneous systems using many legacy applications, so it is important that the extranet security solution supports multiple authentication and encryption methods, firewalls, TCP applications, and operating systems. Encryption is the transformation of data into a form unreadable by anyone without a decryption key. Encryption is a critical technology for securing information as it passes through the Internet.
Authentication is a mechanism to verify the authenticity of both the sender and the message.
Access control protects an organization from security threats by specifying and enforcing who can access what resources on an organization's network. Granular access control is an important distinction from basic access control because it enables IS managers to grant specific individuals access to particular resources. Aventail ExtraNet Center is the only product on the market that can control access to this level of granularity. Role-based security policies allow IS managers to define access parameters according to an individual's role, function, or group. In today's business environment, where partner relationships are dynamic and can be vastly different from one another, this functionality is critical because it enables organizations to easily build a unique relationship with each business partner or group.