Bridgewater Engineering Company BECO a privately held machin

Bridgewater Engineering Company (BECO), a privately held machine shop, makes heavy-duty machinery for factory assembly lines. It sells its presses, grinders, and milling equipment using a few inside salespeople and telephones. It buys its raw materials and supplies from a variety of steel mills and small-parts fabricators located around the world. BECO\'s president, Tom Dalton, has hired you as a consultant and would like your advice regarding how best to share information with the company\'s suppliers. Tom would like to connect his network of computers into their ordering systems so he can order supplies quickly when he needs them. Use the Web and this book\'s accompanying Web links to locate information about extranets and VPNs. Write a report about 200 words that describes and extranet and outlines why Tom might want to use a VPN to connect BECO\'s suppliers to his extranet.

Solution

Extranet is the networking system that connects a company with its own suppliers, vendors, customers and other related businesses with the use of internet and telecommunication system. It is the extended version of intranet where company shares specific information with few designated partners so that faster execution of business activities are easily done. Under Extranet, concerned vendors, suppliers are connected via their login details and firewall is used to protect the communication. A business can make any purchase order of raw materials and supplies to its vendors through extranet and required message is delivered to the concerned vendor for delivery. It improve the efficiency.

It is the primary reason that Tom Dalton is willing to use it with their suppliers. Here, the use of virtual private network (VPN) is imminent because VPN builds secure private tunnel between suppliers and the company. It makes information sharing private, secure and suppliers are virtually present in the company office of Tom Dalton.VPN uses internet to create the secure private tunnel.

Tom wants to use VPN due to following reasons: