Instant Virtual Extranet Overview

Neoteris’ Instant Virtual Extranet (IVE) appliances dramatically reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of deploying secure access to mobile employees and partners, especially when compared to traditional alternatives like VPNs and custom extranet deployments. The IVE delivers these cost efficiencies because it requires no incremental client hardware or software, no changes to the LAN, and virtually no desktop support. And the IVE enhances security at the same time, as it eliminates open network-layer connections between the end user on the Internet and the corporate LAN. The IVE can be deployed in a stand-alone implementation, or as a supplement to any existing VPN or custom extranet deployment.

What is the IVE?
The Neoteris IVE acts as a secure, application-layer gateway intermediating all requests between the public Internet and the internal corporate resources. All requests that enter the IVE are already encrypted by the end user's browser, using SSL/HTTPS 128-bit encryption.   Then each request is subjected to administratively defined access control and authorization policies. Different authentication schemes can be used for different groups of users, including strong authentication such as dual factor authentication and digital certificates. If the request does not meet the authentication and authorization policies that the administrator has defined in the IVE, the request is dropped and is not forwarded to the internal resource. Since the IVE provides a robust security layer between the public Internet and internal resources, administrators don't need to constantly manage security policies and patch security vulnerabilities for numerous different application and Web servers deployed in the public-facing DMZ.

The IVE intermediates access to applications and resource using simple Web browser technologies. Users gain authenticated access to authorized resources via an extranet session hosted by the Neoteris IVE. From any Internet-connected Web browser, users can access rich Web-based enterprise applications, Java applications, file shares and access to terminal hosts. And those users with PCs that have clients for client/server applications, such as Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, can gain application access by enabling proxy through this same, secure Web session.

IVE Functional Components
The IVE consists of these functional components:

	Request handlers provide remote users access to the IVE, which intermediates their requests and passes them along to the internal resources once they have gone through authentication and authorization. The request handlers also pass the reply from the internal resource to the remote user.
	Content transformation core technology that handles all communications when they are inside the IVE
	LAN-side protocol connectors that communicate from the IVE to the internal resource, in the resource's native language