Bandwidth Summer 2006

In April of this year, Check Point Software released version R61 of Connectra™, its SSL-VPN and Web security gateway with integrated endpoint security and intrusion prevention. With this release, Check Point upped the ante in the highly competitive SSL-VPN marketplace offering new security, application, and performance features that meet the needs of even the most demanding customers.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN products and technologies have become a hot topic in the high-tech world. Numerous articles have appeared in trade publications in the past year discussing the advantages and possibilities of SSL-VPN. The articles typically tout the prospect of quick but secure remote access provided by SSL functions built into Internet browsers. Other articles have appeare comparing and contrasting the various SSL vendors offerings, although with varying degrees of accuracy.

Despite all this interest, however, the SSL-VPN market is still a small, but growing, segment of security spending. A Frost & Sullivan study entitled "World Firewall/IPSec VPN Gateway Markets" put the IPSec market value in 2004 at $2.5 Billion. An IDC study conducted at nearly the same time, placed the Worldwide SSL-VPN market at $201 Million, less than 10% of the IPSec market. While projections of the SSL-VPN market have it growing at a faster pace than IPSec, there is still a great disparity between the two technologies in market share. It leads one to wonder, with all this attention, why the slow adoption rates?

Many companies have thought about or tested SSL-VPN. Many have even deployed some SSL-VPN products but it is apparent that most of those have not yet offered the capability to all their remote access users. If your company has remote access requirements for employees, partners, and/or customers, chances are you've looked into the possibility of using SSL-VPN. If you're like many others, you may have found that the promises of simplicity and security are often not fulfilled as advertised.

Check Point Software, known as the market leader in Firewall and IPSec VPN technologies, entered the SSL-VPN market in 2004 with the focus of offering state-of-the-art security features in a simple to use product to customers who are interested in SSL-VPN. The R61 release expands these design criteria by adding significant security, performance, and application support capabilities to Connectra.

Among the many new features included with Connectra R61 are:

Deeper Security Protection - With new on-demand secure workspace, Connectra enables the strongest confidentiality protection when sharing information with third party PCs. This secure workspace, known as Integrity Secure Workspace (ISW) provides a completely segmented, encrypted, partition on the desktop for the SSL-VPN connection with a desktop design whose look and feel, and offered applications are defined by the appliance administrator.

Broader Application Support - Adds clientless on-demand support for remote desktop, terminal emulation, and other applications through browser applets. Applets already defined include such things as telnet, TN3270/5250, RDP, FTP, etc. Perhaps more significant, however, the system provides for the custom presentation of company defined applets allowing almost unlimited support for clientless applications.

Stronger Performance - Delivers stateful load sharing and failover through Check Point's integrated ClusterXL™, the same cluster technology relied upon by thousands of Check Point VPN-1® customers. Check Point's long experience with providing session failover capabilities have been applied to Connectra allowing the grouping of multiple devices for extremely powerful, redundant, and high performance clusters.

These are but a few of the many powerful features of Connectra R61. If you're thinking about SSL-VPN consider Connectra R61 and see how it can fulfill your security and management needs. For further information contact your Akibia or Check Point Sales Representatives, or visit
www.checkpoint.com/products/connectra/index.html.