Is what we are trying to do even possible?

[JeremyRead]

I have looked all over ESRI's site and have not found a straight answer to this question:

Can a service that sits behind a company's firewall be published to ArcGIS Online?

I was under the impression that there was a way to do this, either with ArcGIS Online or Portal for ArcGIS.  Basically, we don't want to expose the service to the public, but we do want to add it to web maps that can be accessed outside of our firewall by people in the field using smart phones and/or tablets running the ArcGIS app.  Since the phones/tablets will be accessing the internet through the cellular network, there isn't a way to have them connect directly into our intranet.  Given this, we would just control access to the actual application by user accounts.

Is this possible to do?  Do we have to choose one or the other?  We're not really interested in having to copy our data to ArcGIS Online regularly, but we also can't make the map service we want to use available to the public either.

[MikeMinami]

No, services inside your firewall will not be accessible unless the client/device is also inside the firewall. If you can put your services outside your firewall and secure them, then you would be able to access them externally. Your users would need to have a username and password to access the service. Alternatively, you could embed the security credentials of the service inside the item in ArcGIS Online and then rely on ArcGIS Online security to govern access to it.

thanks,

Mike

[IB1]

Your users would need to have a username and password to access the service. Alternatively, you could embed the security credentials of the service inside the item in ArcGIS Online and then rely on ArcGIS Online security to govern access to it.

Could you expand on these points? Where would the username/password come from?

[MikeMinami]

This involves getting your ArcGIS Server out externally, then implementing user security on the specific services on your server.

This may be useful...
http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#/Securing_your_ArcGIS_Server_site/015400000...

Once your server is externally available and is secured, then you could add references to services to ArcGIS ONline, and embed the security of the server with the item. Then, whoever can access the item in ArcGIS Online would be able to access the service because the credentials are embedded in ArcGIS ONline.

Thanks,

Mike