Scaling the firewall

Driving around a typical Johannesburg suburb, the most eye catching thing is that every house is surrounded by a wall at least 6 feet high. And these walls are decorated with electric fences or barbed wire. Their electric gates let in only the right people.

These walls keep the bad people out (most of the time), but they have another effect: They keep the good people in. And that means that the neighbourhood feeling of years gone by is all but gone. People don’t even know their neighbours any more — let alone the people living down the street. We are not sharing anymore.

Most companies have very good firewalls. And like their physical counterparts in Jozi, they keep the baddies out. And like the walls in the neighbourhood, they also keep the good stuff inside, out of view.

What if we want to publish some of the information that’s inside the firewall? One option is to poke a little hole in it, to allow web surfers access to information. That’s a bit like giving everyone in the neighbourhood a key to the pedestrian gate, and saying you may only go into the garden shed. Sooner or later someone will venture into your bedroom, and take something that doesn’t belong to them.

Another way to achieve our goal is to set up a public web server on an ISP’s network. Now we push only the information we want onto the web server. This is bit like setting up a stall in the flea market. You can bring the things you want to sell to the stall, but no–one knows what’s in your bedroom. In fact, they don’t even have to know where your house is.

I think this is a much safer way to scale the firewall. This allows the company to decide what gets published, without letting everyone into their network. Recently I set up just such a site for a pharmaceutical company. They wanted to publish their product information on the Internet , so that doctors can search it. Having the site hosted outside of their network allows them to control what part of their product information get published. It keeps the sensitive data private, and it adds huge value to their customers.

Give me your opinion about scaling the firewall.