Voyager 8: Addressing Cross-Cloud Security (Part 2)
Continuing our discussion from The Internet of Things Part 1, the important issues of security and privacy are on most mobile user’s minds. While consumers area accustomed to sharing their information freely as the cost of participating in social media sites, enterprise customers are much more wary. The thought of confidential data or files leaving their protected network is an important and legitimate concern. Furthermore, they worry about the security of their collaborates (vendors, clients, field offices), who have IT infrastructures they often cannot control. Voyager 8 beta addresses these concerns through the addition of NAT capabilities.
Network Address Translation Support (NAT)
The addition of NAT offers increases security to a mobile community by eliminating current firewall restrictions that in most typical employ. Most firewalls inhibit applications from easily and securely spanning networks and firewalls. Voyager’s support for Network Address Translation (NAT), and the resolution of application clients/services with multiple addresses is key for solutions that need to operate on multiple networks and spanning various firewalls. Combined with the ability to communicate securely over the same socket and port, Voyager provides a pervasive borderless middleware platform that does not compromise firewall security.
Voyager’s NAT capabilities are a key security feature used in the Planetary Skin prototype with partner Cisco. Planetary skin is a co-development effort by Cisco, NASA and other partners to cover the planet in a connected sensor network with the goal of collecting climate change information and discovering ways to stop the warming of the earth. This exciting project was named one of TIME Magazine’s 50 Best Inventions of 2009. The NAT capability in Voyager is being used to reduce the number of open ports needed when exchanging large volumes of sensor data and other information between many collaborators and agencies over the internet.
We will update you more on current deployments using Voyager 8 as they become publicly available. For now, we are excited to see the initial applications for The Internet of Things unfold!
