[Cialug] Connect Two Independent Sites

[Todd Walton]

I have an architectural type question for y'all.

There is a company developing a piece of software that will connect with
our own internal systems. Their web app needs to pull data from an
application we have. Our application is not (currently) exposed to the
public. How would you suggest allowing them to connect?

Options I've thought of:

* Our app exposes a public API that they tug on
* We set up a proxy server between the two
* We set up a VPN tunnel of some sort between their servers and ours, at
the network level or at the server level
* We have somebody there and somebody here sitting at keyboards talking on
the phone to each other and transmitting data, and just hope that scales

We're reluctant to expose our test and qa systems to the internet. But
maybe that's a suck-it-up-and-put-on-your-big-boy-pants kind of thing. I
don't know.

Any thoughts on best practice here?

--
Todd