Securing EDI Internet Traffic
The cost associated with using a VAN to send EDI transactions is steep, but the VAN offers secure transmission of the EDI traffic and the trading partners can choose to encrypt and authenticate the traffic. Sending EDI information over the Internet is cheap, but your packets are available for anyone to intercept and examine. Many organizations are applying encryption and digital signing techniques to EDI traffic over the Internet, and this type of security is a developing area of NT technology. For information about digital certificates, see Tao Zhou, "Digital Signature Technology," page 75.
One approach to securing EDI traffic is to route it over Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). A VPN uses point-to-point tunneling to reduce the risk of data interception and improve data transfer characteristics. By using a VPN, you can compress and encrypt the traffic that you transmit and receive. You create a tunnel between the sender and the receiver and open a named IP port on the receiving side only for the duration of the transmission reception. The amount of EDI traffic that flows over VPNs is limited at the moment, but the technology is gaining acceptance and will grow over the next few years.
Microsoft offers a proprietary VPN based on the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP), an alternative to Cisco Systems' proprietary and widely used Layer 2 Forwarding (L2F) standard. PPTP might merge with L2F to create a new default VPN industry standard, but at the moment PPTP supports only Windows clients and NT servers. The initial implementation of PPTP has had both security and performance problems. Microsoft recently announced a replacement for PPTP based on the IP Security (IPSec) standard that Request for Comments (RFC) 1825 through 1929 outline. Currently, the most robust VPNs are running on proprietary hardware solutions that aren't industry standards.
The Future
Many third-party vendors are incorporating EDI into e-commerce packages, and many organizations are increasingly generating new EDI traffic on the Internet. For information about how Microsoft is incorporating EDI features into Site Server Commerce Edition (SSCE), see the sidebar, "SSCE and EDI," page 65. High-volume EDI traffic over VANs will likely be with us for a long time, but Internet commerce applications consisting of EDI represent the area of greatest future growth for document interchange, especially for low-volume traffic that small and midsized businesses require.
Internet-based EDI offers new methods for document exchange and provides an economical means for small companies to participate in and manage EDI traffic. By providing companies a standard they can work with, EDI might aid in making Web-based business-to-business exchange work. E-commerce software might even subsume EDI and ultimately make it transparent to end users and developers.