Second, even if companies can initially staff their departments, retaining these people during a booming economy is a major problem. Third, in this situation, companies must deal with rapid turnover of technology and staff, which can create unacceptable risks to reliability and security. From the NSPs' standpoint, IP VPNs are sold based on a rapid return on investment for the customer, and the relationship built on this service can instill a great sense of customer loyalty. What Customers Need Reliability, Security, and Accessibility Figure 1 shows IDC's view of integrated IP VPN services. This group of capabilities enables IP VPN services users to establish and modify the parameters that govern their customers' and suppliers' access to these applications.
Security is the most critical sales issue for IP VPNs.
If the greatest strength of the Internet is its ubiquity, its greatest weakness is security. While security ranks at the top of the list of concerns for IP VPN end users, IDC believes it will grow in importance as customers seek to control security policies themselves. NSPs must invest in solutions that allow them to provide security that extends from their customers' premises through the network to the trading partner at the other end. This scale and scope must also enable each NSP customer to set the guidelines for which customers and suppliers have access to what capabilities.