On equipment costs and call charges alone, ePipe delivers cost savings of 70 to 80 per cent over traditional ISDN, Frame Relay and other leased line connections in the first year. Furthermore, ePipe does not lock the SMB into a long-term contract, unlike most WAN solutions. Rapid advances in VPN technologies and the evolving nature of growing businesses will drive SMBs to solutions that are highly flexible, scalable and adaptable. Stallion has designed ePipe functions in a modular fashion, enabling a small business to buy the hardware and obtain shared Internet access, and then add other functions such as secure remote access and site to site VPN, as the business grows and needs change. This allows the SMB to maintain its original investment in hardware.
Many networking vendors require SMBs to purchase a new device for every new set of functions.
This also leaves the SMB with an entirely different method of operation and maintenance for every piece of equipment that is purchased. Tailored Internet Security Stallion has addressed concerns over security with a range of options, depending on the features enabled. Off the shelf, ePipe operates as a packet-filtering firewall, hiding private network addresses from the Internet and filtering all traffic. Additional feature sets include PPTP tunnels with encryption that allow remote users to securely access the office network transparently from their PCs or notebooks through the Internet. Site to site connections are protected using IPSec's strong packet authentication and Triple DES, the highest level of data encryption.