The vanishing perimeter?

By Ellen Messmer, NetworkWorld.com, 07/04/05

The perimeter firewall, standing guard at the edge of the corporate network year after year as the chaos of the Internet erupts, holds a venerable position in the eyes of IT managers who can't consider retiring it, even if it does complicate business over the Internet. That an organization called The Jericho Forum claims it's time to find something more suited than a firewall-based architecture for e-commerce strikes many as a quixotic quest, if not dangerously delusional.

Jericho's main contention -- that the perimeter has effectively vanished anyway and the firewall is an obstacle to business-to-business e-commerce -- is provocative. But the idea of finding alternatives to perimeter VPN/firewalls has others asking if this is a practical notion.

That's the topic argued in our story this week. As to what alternatives there may be, Jericho is now reviewing written submissions to a high-tech competition it's holding to hear about ideas for new architectures for secure e-business in a world without the traditional perimeter firewall.

The winner - if any - will be announced at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas later this month. While this won't change the world overnight, there's no reason to underestimate the value of ideas. They're what got the Internet started in the first place and there's room for plenty more like that.

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