E-commerce is no longer a luxury for companies; it is a business imperative. Yet with the convenience of being able to reach suppliers, customers and investors over the Web comes the burden of maintaining data security. This analysis considers the importance of security to protect an organization in an e-commerce environment.
Firewalls are most commonly gateway computers that isolate local users from the outside world. Files that are accessed for downloading are not loaded directly onto the system, but reside within a quarantine site until they are scanned for viruses and other software threats. Only those files that are deemed to be safe are passed through the firewall (Epper Hoffman, 2003).
There are three technologies closely associated with most firewalls: packet filters, application gateways, and stateful inspection. The type, or types, of technology that are appropriate to a particular firewall is based on the layer at which it operates. The transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) is the common computer language by which networked computers (including those which comprise the Web) communicate. There are five layers within TCP/IP: physical, data link, network (IP), transport and application. Data must pass through each of these layers before reaching its final destination (Thompson, 1997).
Proxy servers have evolved from being just another type of firewall to being a key part of an organization's security approach. Today, these servers take advantage of low-cost storage and highly efficient machines that can process information quickly to combine the functions of a firewall with the functions of a cache server. Thus today's proxy servers cache commonly and frequently accessed Web pages so that users have more efficient access to the pages and also so that there is a barrier between the user and the actual Web site. Whenever possi
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