Your IT users are increasingly mobile whether they are working from home, while traveling or at a customer site. As an organization, you will therefore want to provide secure yet easy access to essential IT systems for these external users. There is also an increased incentive to integrate customers, partners, suppliers and remote offices into central business and IT processes in order to develop new business opportunities and gain productivity.

On top of this, organizations change continuously through the calibration of business units, mergers and acquisitions, new hires, and existing users changing roles and positions.

A great challenge in this fast and ever changing environment is application deployment to mobile and geographically distributed users including: network management, identity management (authentication, authorization, access and audit trail) and IT security. Existing application platforms must be leveraged and deployed to new and existing users in internet portals without having to invest time and cost to rewrite applications or renew the IT infrastructure.

To succeed in this changing environment, we believe that enterprises should re-examine how they view network security. And we would argue that networks are, in fact, inherently insecure. Despite billions of dollars poured into securing network infrastructures, network attacks are more vicious and powerful than ever. This is particularly true as more employees' laptops and mobile devices move inside and outside of traditional network boundaries, raising the threat from worms, viruses, and Trojan horses. What's more, the most effective and damaging attacks on networks actually come from inside a corporation's walls, not from the outside.

The security perimeter should therefore shift from networks to the application data center. The device that sits at this perimeter will be a scalable “application on demand” architecture, with an SSL VPN at its core that enables capabilities as secure internet communication, secure application access, identity management, Single Sign-on (SSO), audit trails and billing.

The new business environment also calls for new business models in delivering application systems to employees, partners and customers. IT departments, application software suppliers and application service providers will offer software applications as a service, as an “application on demand” service. Here, users or customers only invest into a local PC and an internet connection and pay only for the use, as with a telephone or other utilities. All application licenses, infrastructure licenses, application deployment and security etc. are handled by the application service provider.

This calls for a highly secure, turn-key, “application on demand” solution at an acceptable cost. This solution must provide access to any existing software application in a browser via the Internet. The system must complement and easily integrate into the existing IT -infrastructure and -security, including existing networks, firewalls and application portals, without any change in existing software applications. In addition, the solution must provide tools to manage the ongoing and changing requirements (who has and had access to what, when and how) in a simple and effective manner. Return on investment should be immediate by providing a turnkey solution that can be implemented rapidly in a “plug and play” fashion, managed and scaled easily to an acceptable cost.

Seven Mountains provides solutions for the "On-Demand" Enterprise that speed application deployment, lower costs and increase efficiency and flexibility of access to applications and data.

"On-demand" application services allow companies to expose business functions to their employees, customers, and partners through secure access to corporate internal software applications over the Internet. This also provides companies with opportunities to increase revenues and deepen relationships with customers, partners, and employees.

In a business world transformed by globalization, IT staff must be able to easily authorize and provide users with anytime, anywhere, secure access to any enterprise application they are authorized for. They must deliver business-critical applications and information quickly and efficiently. Continuous access to real-time information is integral to success. Accomplishing this across the Internet requires robust, centralized application delivery and management capabilities. The solution must be scalable, reliable, manageable and secure.

All these business drivers make a compelling case for including existing software applications in a corporate portal or intra/extranets. However, to date, few applications have been developed specifically for Web-based delivery. Although it is possible to re-engineer existing software for Web publication, this approach is time consuming and expensive.

How can interactive, legacy applications be easily Web-enabled for inclusion in a browser or enterprise portals without costly and timeconsuming re-engineering?. And how can these applications be more efficiently managed, deployed and supported to augment the business and cost benefits of a portal? And how can security, firewall, user and identity management challenges be solved?

Seven Mountains offers products that address these requirements:

We deliver this functionality as standard products through local distributors to different user segments, often with distributed organizations and high focus on security and mobility.

The Seven Mountains solutions are very easy to use, quick to implement with simple and straight-forward management tools. They are scalable and designed for all types of organizations, from the very small to the large and highly complex.

As a result, application access, deployment and hosting is made simpler, more flexible and less costly, while at the same time improving security.

Further benefits of the Seven Mountains solutions are: