Mobile devices are becoming increasing prevalent among today's workforce, with an estimated 15 million PDAs and 30 million smartphones hitting the market in 2005. E-mail is the killer application with smartphones, while companies are increasingly using managed PDAs for vertical specific applications such as CRM, supply chain, salesforce and field productivity applications.

SSL VPN product company Aventail has announced its Secure Mobile Access Solution for PDAs and smartphones. Aventail Mobile is a complete SSL VPN for mobile devices which promises to provide easy access to critical applications from virtually any mobile device with complete security and granular access control. Aventail Mobile supports all major operating systems, including Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile, DoCoMo, and Symbian.

Aventail claims the solution is the only one to provide a single gateway and a common management and user experience for all devices, whether a home PC, laptop, kiosk or mobile device. For administrators, Aventail Mobile is integrated into Aventail's centralised policy model, so it should be easy to set-up and control mobile device access, saving time and money. Users access applications on their mobile device via the same URL and authentication method they use for access from other systems.

Aventail Mobile also optimises the application content on each mobile device, so a user automatically gets access only to those applications that are appropriate for his or her device, rather than being shown links to applications that aren't available. For example, a user on a Smartphone would receive a link to Outlook Mobile Access and not to Outlook Web Access, which they would receive if at a kiosk or home PC. No other SSL or IPSec VPN-based mobile solution on the market today is able to do this, claims Aventail.

'As mobile devices populate and play a larger role in enterprise networks, it is imperative that SSL VPNs embrace this capability,' said Evan Kaplan, CEO and president, Aventail. 'We believe that individual mobile gateways will go away and these features and capabilities will be built into SSL VPN platforms, which are quickly becoming the application gateway for all devices, resources, and users.'

To ensure security and control, Aventail Mobile is integrated into Aventail's Unified Policy and End Point Control functions. Mobile devices are only allowed access based on user identity and security of the device. Aventail technology interrogates the end point and classifies the device into a Policy Zone, allowing access only to authorised and relevant applications. Importantly, authorised users are only given access directly to named resources with no direct network connection, unlike IPSec and other solutions that give open network access to devices.

BIOS, Sep 26, 05 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Security