VPN Smartphone: Aventail Announces The First Mobile SSL VPN For Smartphones

Recently, one of the leading secure remote access provider Aventail announced Aventail Connect Mobile for smartphones -- the industry's first and only SSL VPN to provide full support and secure end point control for Windows Mobile smartphones. Connect Mobile is an easy-to-use and easy-to-manage add-on to Aventail's award-winning SSL VPN appliances, allowing IT managers to easily extend their secure remote access solution to all mobile devices. As such, it is part of an integrated solution for all remote access, including laptops, kiosks, home computers, Windows Mobile PDAs, and now smartphones. Connect Mobile gives end users an "in-office experience," connecting them to e-mail without a separate infrastructure, and giving them access to client/server applications and other corporate resources as if they were on their laptops, all with seamless roaming. It provides enhanced security as well, with user authentication, device watermarking, device health checking, encryption and granular access controls.

Aventail Connect Mobile for smartphones was designed for network managers who realize that mobility in the workplace is just a fact of life, and need a solution that is easy for end users as well as secure and cost-effective to manage.

"The ever-increasing popularity of …devices is driving specific requirements for mobile remote access. Aventail capitalizes on this with the strongest solution for mobile devices -- which includes a wide array of devices," writes Robert Whiteley, Sr. Analyst, Forrester Research, in his December 2006 report, The Forrester Wave: SSL VPN Appliances, Q4 2006. "More importantly, though, Aventail is the only vendor to support the necessary one-two punch of these performance-oriented features -- like compression, session persistence, and seamless roaming -- and built-in endpoint security functionality, regardless of device type."

Aventail Connect Mobile features and benefits now extended to smartphones include:

• Instant e-mail and access: Now, users of Windows Mobile smartphones and PDAs can get continual "push" e-mail from their Microsoft Exchange or Lotus iNotes servers without the risks of putting their e-mail servers in the DMZ or exporting their corporate e-mail to a service provider. In addition, they can click on secured links in e-mails and immediately approve requisitions or review documents, instead of waiting to log in from a laptop.
• Seamless mobile roaming: Smartphone users can change networks during their sessions without having to re-authenticate or re-launch the VPN.
• Mobile End Point Control: Windows Mobile devices are seamlessly interrogated to determine the appropriate level of trust for the device prior to gaining access. Aventail can check for digital certificates or other corporate watermarks, level of OS patch, and whether other security products such as antivirus solutions are running.
• Granular access controls: Aventail Connect Mobile leverages the unified access control policies of the Aventail SSL VPN to limit access to sensitive corporate data based on user ID and device trust. There is no need to set up and manage different policies and solutions to cover just mobile devices. Users can gain authorized access to any application on any device, as long as the device itself supports the application.

"Aventail is a necessary part of protecting today's mobile enterprise," said Chris Witeck, Director of Product Marketing, Aventail. "With the latest release of Aventail Connect Mobile, Aventail has once again led the market in providing an easy to use, easy to manage, and secure remote access solution for the growing number of Windows Mobile device users."

Pricing and Availability:

Aventail Connect Mobile for smartphone is now in beta, and will be generally available this summer. An add-on feature to Aventail's SSL VPN solutions, Aventail Connect Mobile's pricing starts at $995.00.

About Aventail
Aventail is the best-of-breed remote access company. Aventail delivered the first SSL VPN solution in 1997 and today is a market leader, delivering a remote access control solution that is the easiest to use and easiest to control. Aventail SSL VPN appliances provide users with transparent, clientless access to more applications from more devices via any network environment. For network managers, Aventail delivers a single secure access gateway for all users, internal and external, to all network resources with complete security. With more than 2.5 million end users around the globe, Aventail is the SSL VPN of choice among mid-sized to large-sized organizations worldwide, including AT&T, Chicago Housing Authority, DePaul University, DuPont, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), IBM Global Services, James Richardson International, Mississippi Department of Corrections, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Overlake Hospital, Radiology Ltd., and Sanyo. For more information, go to www.aventail.com.

SOURCE: Aventail