On the other hand, a great push was felt by companies all over the world to have their own sites and connection to this marvelous electronic worldwide market. Unlimited is the new horizon of commercial advantages and/or flexibility that is reachable with all this new technology, such as a great variety of commercial, educational and marketing operations, local and/or long distance technical assistance support, product distribution and home-banking among many other facilities it provides us.

The attempt to reach wealthy results quite soon and all the factors mentioned above have often lead many companies to unsafe connections to the Web that can easily drive them to huge disasters with great negative influences on their operation and/or image, which will certainly revert the expected results.

Unfortunately, I have been noticing very little or almost no importance given to a component that is quite essential for the correct operation of the duet hardware and software - peopleware! Many of the companies and/or IT people I have been talking to lately are capable of spending several hours explaining the new technical implementation at their places, but almost none of them can estimate the amount of time and money that is dedicated to training activities, that would make possible for all these people to have the proper understanding of their role in the play they are being involved into.

Reliability, authenticity and integrity are the most wanted characteristics in any electronic transaction we perform at the Web, but are these simple words, or even more than that, are these simple concepts, meaningful to the end user? What is the use of having such high-end technological implementation if the users cannot have an overall understanding of the whole scene they are going through?

So, here comes up the first point that should be stressed - there must be some time and economical resources specifically dedicated to a training program in any connection implementation program that wants to be lead to sucess.

But sometimes, we can also observe that many companies and/or IT departments have chosen the proper hardware, the correct software and can count on the highest qualified and trained personnel, but yet cannot achieve acceptable levels of performance and reliability on the implementation they have worked on, what finally leads them to malfunctioning, improper operation and unsafe connection. Has our whole theory faked? Were we going toward a misplaced North compass needle?

I would not say so. There is still another brick to be put in the wall we are building up, and the name of this remaining component is - policy. We surely ought to have a clear and well defined policy that will guide us through each and every step of the whole implementation process. Thus, all the required basic phases of the project, such as requirements, structure, components, usages and operation definitions should comply to the previously stablished goals, so that every action taken along the effort to make our connection to the Internet safe makes sense at all.

All these facets involved in the complex scene of connecting a company to the world wide web require a very well organized study of the many possibilities to do so. But whatever way you choose, a good policy will still be very helpful. The IT department policy, which will embrace the Internet connection policy as well, should work tightly coupled with the whole operational policy of the involved company, in order to fulfill, and have fulfilled, all of its basic needs to function accordingly to the commom objectives. It is useless having a - technically speaking - perfect system that does not provides the company what it needs. Besides that, having an adequate IT policy will guarantee total support from the company highest levels of executives and direction, making it easier to obtain the necessary human and economical resouces for correct project implementation.

Leastwise inserted in the text, but not less important, it is quite easy understandable that there also must be a carefully planned and practiced strategy for both very important tasks, generally neglected, or left untouched behind the scenes - system maintainance and auditing.

System maintainance status can easily become critical if left unattended for too long. There is a natural and expected degradation of the system capability to function as previously observed and reported at its start-up, due to usage dynamics and also external/internal environment modification, what includes new reported ways to have your system attacked, turning it up to be obsolete in such aspect.

Finally, the adoption of an auditing strategy is quite important to achieve high levels of reliability on the connection of your company to the world wide web, what means mantaining it functioning sucessfully, with constant observation of its capability to perform the tasks it was designed to and still keep all the operations within a safe operational envelope, preventing your company of having its data, operation and image damaged by either internal and/or external attacks.