Forum Moderators: phranque
Off the top of my head I questioned the speed and security. However, they wanted to know if it could be done...that's where you guys come in. ;) If this can be done with reasonable security, what would be required?
Rather than open the port of the DB to the internet, you might want to look into VPN solutions so that the traffic is secure, and you have to make the connections over the secure network.
Do you have any issues with speed in this VPN setup? What sort of connection are you working with?
Speed can be an issue, but I'm using a hardware VPN at both ends, built into each firewall/router, so the speed issue is minimal. If I use the software VPN client while on the road, it becomes more of an issue.
I'm using T1 and OC3 connections. The biggest issue I see is that when I need to do a large file transfer, if I do it over VPN it will max out the 1.5 mbit T1 connection, leaving little bandwidth for web site users on that end. This isn't normally a problem for the typical data transfer between sites, and it only occurs when I'm trying to move large files from one server to the other. If I do the transfer over the net without VPN, everything is fine. I suspect that the encrypted data doesn't compress well, and therefore uses more bandwidth, though I've never tried to prove this theory.
As stated before, my data really isn't sensitive, so it could be transfered through XML just as well, and then whatever speed issues there are will be minimized.
