Cambridge, Mass. - If secure, manageable VPN services are what you seek, then long-awaited offerings from GTE Internetworking may be for you.
The ISP last week announced VPN Advantage, a service that will let remote users connect to their offices around the country via GTE Internetworking's Internet backbone or the Internet using dedicated T-1 lines or dial-up analog connections.
Virtual private network (VPN) service customers will have the option of deploying preconfigured TimeStep PERMIT/Gate and Shiva LanRover VPN Gateway Plus devices at their dedicated VPN sites. The products will sit behind a user's router to encrypt and decrypt traffic traveling over the VPN.
VPN Advantage will feature strong security with 128-bit key encryption and X.509 digital certificates. The ISP is also teaming with two companies - its sister company, GTE CyberTrust, and Entrust - to act as a certificate authority. A certificate authority is in charge of authenticating and authorizing user access to VPN resources.
Security is one of the reasons Crown Central Petroleum is testing VPN Advantage.
Authorizing clients with security features that stretch beyond simple password and challenge scenarios is a key requirement in setting up Crown's VPN, says Miguel Montanez, group manager of IS at the Baltimore oil company.
Crown's 400 to 450 remote workers will be sending financial information over the company's VPN, so Montanez wants to also be sure that the traffic is encrypted when sent over GTE's network.
Users should also expect reliability with GTE's service-level guarantees.
For example, service-level agreements for dedicated VPN Advantage customers promise 99.9% availability and a guarantee that users will not experience more than 125 msec of round-trip latency on GTE's network.
The company plans to credit users 1% of their monthly service charges for every .1% of missed availability, says Robert McKinney, director of VPN services at GTE Internetworking. For example, a customer paying $1,795 per month whose connection was only available 99.1% of the time in a month would be credited $143.60.
VPN Advantage also guarantees that dial-up customers will connect to GTE Internetworking's network 97% of the time.
All VPN Advantage customers will be able to access real-time information about their VPNs on a special GTE Internetworking Web site. Users will be able to request reports, determine usage, establish trouble tickets and even revoke digital certificates almost instantly.
Dedicated VPN Advantage is slated for availability in January and is priced at $1,795 to $3,295 per T-1 port depending on usage. The monthly fee also includes all digital certificates, 24-7 network management and monitoring, and a VPN device. Dial-up VPN Advantage costs $39.95 per user for 30 hours of usage per user, which is combined into a total pool of hours for a company.
GTE Internetworking: (617) 873-4000.
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