Overview

There’s a common feeling among creative and innovative business minds that IT acts as a roadblock to progress. This can happen whenever a business wants to share information with partners, add new software, or connect new devices to the network: IT suddenly goes into guard dog mode.  But that’s actually their job – they’re responsible for safeguarding the company’s digital infrastructure.

Why IT Seems Like a Barrier

For every new device, application, or 3rd-party that is introduced to the network, IT must either protect it, or protect against its vulnerabilities. IT is trying to:

• Limit attack surfaces
• Limit the number of firewall rules
• Protect against ransomware attacks
• Protect corporate data 

The corporation is vulnerable, and IT jobs are on the line.

This natural tension between IT and business often causes huge delays in time-to-market which in turn causes:

• Delayed revenue and missed competitive advantage
• Lost context because of the time from request to implementation
• Mistakes because of the lost context
• Huge associated costs both directly and indirectly

The reason for all of this is that the network architecture is directly tied to the business rules, and it suffers from 30+ years of incrementally adding security layers. Simply adding a new device means understanding all the vulnerabilities of that device and deciding exactly how it will interface with the network.

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Difficult

A simple abstraction of the business rules from the IT infrastructure allows maximum agility and time-to-market on the business side. At the same time, it enables IT to simplify the network protection and frees them from being involved  in the business rules. This is not a re-architecture of the entire system; it can be done on a project basis. Moving forward, each new project gets to market faster, causing fewer security woes to the IT department.

How It Works 

• Atsign’s atPlatform abstracts the legacy network from the data flow while supporting the business rules. 
• This solution integrates easily into existing networking and security infrastructure.
• Each person, entity, or thing on the network has its own atSign.  The atSign serves as the address on the network, and it abstracts the IP address, which means firewall rules can be simplified. 
• Each atSign has cryptographic keys that are cut and stored on the edge—used for data encryption—so there are no passwords.
• All data is encrypted specifically for the receiving person, entity, or thing, so subsets of data can be distributed solely to those who need access.
• Data can be assigned an expiration date, making it accessible only for a predetermined period.

This is all independent of the connectivity to the network, whether it is direct internet, WiFi, cellular, or even in a private network.

All of this serves as an abstraction layer, so there is no need to involve IT in setting up or administering new business projects. In fact, IT gets the benefit of drastically simplifying their configuration and rulesets because:

• There are no attack surfaces.
• There is virtually no IT administrative burden such as VPNs or firewall changes.
• There are no passwords.

There is no need to replace existing systems to start using this simplified way to implement new projects and data flows. The atPlatform works with existing TCP/IP networks, offering frictionless time-to-market on a new project. Explore our open-source SDKs and contact info@atsign.com for in-depth guidance.