The announcements come as the SSL VPN category – which offers simplified alternatives to IPSec VPNs – starts to gain recognition. Analysts put the market at $1bn in three years, and big security vendors are said to be sniffing around for acquisitions.
uRoam CEO Skip Glass said: SSL VPNs are going to be taking significant market share from IPSec VPNs. The company, which was funded to the tune of $39m late last year, is pumping a lot of its resources into sales and marketing this year, having previously worked with angel funding and an extremely limited sales staff.
FirePass is unique in the market in that it offers remote access to virtually any application, without the need for a client, Glass said. The closest competitor, Aventail Inc, requires a client for the same type of access FirePass offers, he claimed, and the others have other limitations.
At the basic level, SSL VPNs offer secure browser access to applications such as email and files. One level up, applets spoofing the domain of specific applications can be used to route application traffic over SSL. More sophisticated still are SSL VPNs that closely mimic the functions of an IPSec VPN.
Version 3.5 of the FirePass software adds application-specific connectors for Exchange clusters and FTP. The general-purpose VPN connector now supports split tunneling and failover. The policy engine in the software can now reformat email and files for non-PC devices such as PDAs and cell phones.
Source: Computerwire
