GTSI has secure Web access app based on NASA program

GTSI Corp. has begun selling a product-based on a program originally developed for NASA-that offers secure access to legacy systems via the Internet.

The Secure Application Gateway is a system that GTSI assembled using commercial products, said Sanjay Barthakur, the GTSI senior technical consultant who originally assembled the system for NASA.

The company demonstrated the application today at FOSE 2004 in Washington.

With this system, no hand coding is needed to link legacy systems to a Web platform Barthakur said. The gateway works behind an organization's firewall and draws information from the legacy apps through an application server.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., first commissioned GTSI to provide a way for employees to access spacecraft test data stowed on Boeing Co. systems in Los Angeles. The resulting system let 50 users, with access identification cards, remotely sign in to seven legacy apps as Web services.

By using ID badges, parties can securely sign on to the gateway, which provides an encrypted funnel to the legacy apps, Barthakur said. The system uses a Sun Microsystems Sun Fire v880 server running Solaris.

The original system developed for NASA cost approximately $250,000. The price for other users will depend on the size of the implementation and the number of users, said Jim Propps, business development manager for GTSI of Chantilly, Va.