Spotlight

SSL VPN holds the future

Aventail Corporation is upbeat over SSL VPN’s prospects in the enterprise market with scores of mobile workers wanting to connect, says Vinutha V.

It’s a technological era where remote access is the mantra. Security in remote access is a major challenge faced by enterprises. Aventail Corporation is an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) VPN (Virtual Private Network) product company that offers client-less and client-based secure remote access. The company was founded in 1996 in Seattle during the e-commerce boom. Web-based transactions were important during that time. Connecting remote users to corporate resources in a secure manner was also the main concern. Aventail seized this opportunity by offering SSL VPN solutions. Although the industry did not realise its importance then, the trend caught on fuelled by growing demand for remote access.

“We were the first company to bring out SSL VPN technology. Certain mature IT markets such as North America, Europe and Asia Pacific responded well to the new technology. These markets had high broadband and PC penetration and they were demanding easy, client-less access to the network resources from anywhere, any time and by using any device,” says Ajay Kumar, Country Manager for Aventail Corporation in India.

Remote access today

With the changing working styles, end users have new computing and communication devices and an ever-increasing set of expectations that is driving the demand for the expanded remote access. Companies today have to support remote workers who supplement office hours by working from a home PC, business partners working from their offices behind their own firewalls and ad-hoc remote access users who want client-less, broadband and Wi-Fi access from anywhere. Many companies extend their networks not only to mobile employees but also to trading partners, consultants and customers around the globe. These situations bring security concerns to the forefront.

SSL vs IPSec

Traditional VPNs are based on the IPSec protocol that enables site-to-site connectivity. As enterprises extended their networks, IPSec’s limitations left them unable to meet remote access needs. In the remote access scenario, IPSec VPNs can increase security risks. The lack of a standard for different IPSec vendors can create problems for the IT department charged with running an extended enterprise network. This becomes a major issue in India as companies here are busy extending remote access to corporate resources to their employees, mobile workforce and business partners so as to create an extended enterprise environment. Such companies are expected to adopt SSL VPN technology. In SSL VPN, access can be limited to specific applications via SSL, whereas IPSec gives ‘all or nothing’ access to network resources. SSL VPN is focussed on application-layer traffic.

IPSec VPN is suitable for long-life connections where broad and persistent network-layer connections are required. SSL VPN is best suited for applications where individuals need access to applications and resources. By providing strong security for remote access through a secure, proxied connection to those resources that a user is authorised to access, SSL VPN provides a direct network connection. The increasing focus on SSL VPN does not affect the value of IPSec VPN as the latter is the de facto standard for site-to-site VPN. But Kumar admits that if an organisation requires implementing a secure remote access solution, one can consider an SSL VPN solution either in addition to or as a replacement for IPSec VPN.

Adoption in India

Major development works of Aventail take place at the Indian centre. About 65 percent of its development team is based out of India. Bangalore’s development centre is home to about 50 percent of Aventail’s global product support team.

Larger organisations are embracing SSL VPN technology. A year and a half after setting up sales operations in India, Aventail has been able to get 8,000 concurrent users in verticals such as IT services, manufacturing and BFSI. Wipro, which has major on-site operations is its largest customer. For Marico Industries, it has extended its ERP applications to its vendors and suppliers. They access the ERP application remotely using Aventail’s SSL VPN technology. TESCO, ITC and iGate are the other Indian customers.

Despite the exposure to global working conditions, Indian enterprises are still not open to the culture of allowing employees to work from home; they allow only a limited portion of the workforce to take advantage of this option. But the drop in cost of broadband connections and growth in PC sales along with the increasingly long travelling time are all expected to drive the adoption of SSL VPN.

Aventail also believes that awareness is the key to increase business. In August 2005 it had an awareness campaign, ‘Replace IP Sec’, wherein it named Cisco and SonicWall’s products and gave a point-by-point comparison of SSL vs IPSec technology. Aventail competes with Juniper, F5, Cisco, and SonicWall which are into IPSec as well as SSL VPN. Kumar says the company’s patented feature Smart Tunnelling differentiates it from its competitors. The feature enables remote access without a client and routing tables are populated accordingly.

Aventail aims at targetting enterprises with extended set-ups wherein customers, vendors and suppliers are connected. The company is looking for enterprises that have a large number of mobile workers who need to connect remotely. The target verticals are IT, BFSI (mostly insurance), manufacturing and automobile industry. Aventail is currently talking to automobile companies based in India. In Gartner’s 2004 SSL VPN Magic Quadrant, Aventail was positioned in the Leader quadrant. Frost & Sullivan forecasts that the SSL VPN industry will reach nearly $300 million in 2010. The research firm predicts that the SSL VPN market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 34 percent till 2011. “The SSL VPN market is poised to grow in India. Remote access will become de facto as it enables higher productivity for companies,” explains Kumar. Aventail has Almasa Network Solutions as its distributor and HCL Comnet, Sify and VFM as its resellers for the Aventail EX-1500, Aventail EX-750 and Aventail EX-2500 products and is in the process of strengthening its channel partners’ network.

vinutha@expresscomputeronline.com