Accessing HTMLDB application outside of firewall....

Question

If I develop an HTMLDB application on my database server that is inside my corporate firewall, how do I have people outside the firewall access it. Do I need to open one or more ports on the firewall? Using the same situation, is it possible to access this application externally from a Portal page?
Thanks,
Brett

Answer 1

As already mentioned this issue is not really an Apex issue, but an issue between your webserver ports and your InfoSec firewall folks. You also want to consider whether the data is sensitive enough to warrant HTTPS with SSL encrypted traffic rather than straight HTTP. At our institution we generally require HTTPS for corporate data but since the encryption requires a lot of processing it affects your application server performance. We have gone to a BigIP switch for all our HTTPS public ports, then from BIgIP to the app server we are behind the firewall and run http. So the Public Portal URL is https to the BigIP which then negotiates with the App servers. Our Network BigIP engineer works out the fiewall rules with our InfoSec folks. This approach offloads all the encryption processing to a dedicated hardware switch rather than to the app server. BigIp also allows for additional rules that can be set up to force certain URLs to require a VPN, for example.
Pat