McAfee E-Business Server
The name of this product may lead many to believe it’s a fully featured e-business package; it isn’t. E-Business Server is in fact a tool that integrates into your business processes to provide secure transactions.
The vendor supplies some example scenarios that are quite illustrative of the use of the product. As an example, a hardware developer may share large design files of confidential data with a chipset manufacturer. Each night the company’s server may automatically send the files to the manufacturer’s server via FTP.
Admittedly each company will have its own firewall security in place, but while it’s being transmitted over the Internet, it’s fair game. E-Business Server encrypts the data with the business partner’s public key, thus protecting it from interception. An added benefit of the product is that before it encrypts the data, which may be large CAD files for example; it compresses the files, thus saving on data transfer costs as well.
The product has a wide range of uses. For instance, it could protect real-time transfer of credit card or point-of-sale data, healthcare provider information such as billing and patient records, in fact any transaction that involves the transfer of sensitive data over the Internet.
Installing the product is relatively straightforward, however to actually use it in a meaningful way, you must access its functions from your existing applications either via the command line interface, Unix Shell scripts, C/C++, CGI scripts, ASP pages, or an optional set of APIs allowing the command set to be added to programming languages such as Visual Basic/COM, Perl, and Java. Platform requirements are quite modest, although we tested the product on a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 with 256MB of memory and so cannot confirm that the minimum requirements are actually usable. However, we can say it was very quick on the test system.
Operating system support is quite good covering Windows NT/2000, some flavours of Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX.
E-Business Server supports all PGP and x.509 certificates and a very solid collection of encryption algorithms, both symmetrical and public key, in addition to several common hash algorithms.
| Product: | McAfee E-Business Server |
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| Price: | AU$13,221.15 (2-year license, 1 year of e-mail-based support) |
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| Vendor: | Network Associates |
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| Phone: | 1800 644 646 |
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| Web: | www.networkassociates.com |
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| Interoperability: |
Supports quite a wide variety of operating systems. |
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| Futureproofing: |
½
Very flexible and given the wide platform support, is a safe bet. |
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| ROI: |
½Relatively expensive but a powerful tool. |
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| Service: |
Four levels of support available up to 24x7 telephone support. |
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| Rating: |
½ |
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4%
2%
