Saturday, November 27, 2004

Protecting Your Enterprise Network from Vendor App Servers?: "anomaly wonders: 'I work for a company with a large IT infrastructure. We have lots of applications in our environment. For a number of applications, vendors provide the apps, and provide core support to those app servers. Our vendors are notorious for demanding superuser access to the boxes that support their applications. To protect our enterprise network from attacks allowed in by well-meaning but less-than-perfectly-competent vendors, we have set up a quarantined network for each vendor. This works well when the model is ASP-like and all of the components live on a single box, but fails when the application needs to be connected to one or more enterprise applications (RDBMS, smtp, they want backup, etc) or when it needs to be connected to lots of target systems inside our environment on lots of different ports. How can I restrict a vendor/application server's access to our enterprise network while still providing platforms to make the applications productive for our user community?'"—Slashdot: