You want to take advantage of your ERP package's latest and greatest features—the bells and whistles that will let you do anything from anywhere. You want reliable remote access for your branches, your sales force and impromptu travelers. You want a web presence integrated with your back office. What you really want is access to your information from the 19th hole. What you don't want is to expose your entire operation to your competition.

True, securing yourself from these dangers adds complexity and expense to your environment, but don't sacrifice access to these new features. Instead, find a balance between depth of security and cost.

To protect yourself while extending your ERP environment to remote locations, you could incur the costs of creating your own private network via leased lines between locations. You also have the option of participating in an already existing private network through offerings by third-party companies. Traffic across these private networks never gets exposed to the Internet, making it a poor target for hackers.

Costs can mount rapidly, however and availability for your more remote branches will sometimes be an issue. Besides, your sales force or traveling executives aren't in a fixed location where you can simply install another line and you need to service them also. Maintaining a bank of dial-in lines no longer makes sense given the relatively low cost, high bandwidth and global availability of the Internet. Hotels now offer high bandwidth Internet access from their rooms (usually wired) and lobbies (usually wireless). Mobile Internet connection to central office Internet connection is rapidly becoming a standard.

In today's WAN environment, the Internet will most likely carry some, if not all, of your remote connectivity traffic. So how do you protect yourself? The home versions of most firewall products do not accommodate business needs (configuration choices tend to be as robust as a light switch: you may choose on or off) and software firewalls are only able to analyze traffic that has already been allowed into your network. Springing for a more business-class firewall with more robust management options gives you the ability to open your system up only to particular IP addresses on the Internet while keeping the rest of the world out. This solution, although inexpensive and much safer than leaving your connection wide open, still doesn't accommodate travelers whose IP addresses change every time they connect.

This leads us into the realm of Virtual Private Networks, a solution that allows your private traffic to travel in safety across the public internet. VPN is considerably more secure than the above solution and is rapidly becoming the method of choice to connect branches to the main network over the Internet. Most VPN solutions include software for the mobile user to gain secure access, regardless of IP address.

Between these mobile licenses and the branch devices, VPN costs can mount but not as high as building your own private network or renting one as mentioned above. Another option is to deploy portal technology. This type of product allows you to give access to content and applications securely via the web, relying on the encryption of secure certificates to protect your data, while addressing the needs of travelers and branches alike.

The right solution for you will most likely involve a combination of multiple security methods. Companies must define their own comfort level when comparing cost and security. But don't let that stop you from taking advantage of your ERP package's Internet dependent features.