Kontiki beefs up security

Kontiki, a managed delivery company launched by former AOL and Netscape execs, has enhanced the security in its content delivery network with Adobe PDF support, a VeriSign partnership and its own technology.

The company has added support for Adobe files and says it can now deliver PDFs with the same security and speed that it delivers other digital content. That means Kontiki can ensure that only authorized users access PDFs, and it can control how PDFs are used, restricting printing or forwarding of those documents, for example.

Kontiki also has added support within its delivery system for VeriSign's new security technology called the VeriSign Access Management Service.

VeriSign AMS is a managed service operated by VeriSign that is based on IBM's Tivoli Access Manager. AMS provides a mechanism for centrally managing users, groups, roles, permissions and policies across e-business applications. By integrating AMS with the Kontiki Delivery Management System, customers can centrally manage security features such as single sign-on, ensuring that only authorized users have access to content delivered by Kontiki.

Earlier this year I wrote about Kontiki's Delivery Management System, which includes a technology called XML Delivery Security. That enables Kontiki to secure the content it delivers all the way from a server to a desktop. Kontiki's software-based delivery network is a peer-to-peer type of approach that makes use of available PC resources and underutilized bandwidth within a network. Kontiki monitors network traffic and can deliver files when network congestion is low.

The people at Kontiki say they're not a peer-to-peer company, though, in the strictest, Napster-esque sense of the word.

"If you think back to Napster, the thing wrong with that was that users controlled where and under what terms they could get files. There was no management, no security," says Mark Szeleyni, Kontiki's director of enterprise marketing. "We talk about it as peer-assisted. So while we allow other nodes in the network to participate in delivery, the parameters around the delivery and the control of the content is all centrally administered."

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Denise Dubie is a Staff Writer covering network management at Network World. She also works as a freelance writer in the Boston area. You can reach her at ddubie@nww.com.