Secure Remote Access

According to an IDC report, "U.S. Mobile Worker Population Forecast and Analysis, 2002-2006", by the end of 2006, approximately two-thirds of all US workers will be mobile - in very different forms than the stereotypical traveling executive or sales person dialing in from a hotel room to check his email.

These mobile workers are knowledge workers with an "anywhere, anytime" attitude towards work; in a meeting room at a client's site; in a coffee shop or airport; or from their office at home. In addition, many companies extend their networks not only to mobile employees but also to trading partners, consultants and customers around the globe.

This increased emphasis on mobility has driven unprecedented demand for access to corporate data and information that resides on corporate networks, intranets and applications.

The IT Challenge

Most of these companies still rely on IPSec or Point-to-Point VPN's to ensure secure access to corporate networks, data and information. IPSec VPN's struggle with NAT (network address translation) traversal, access control for traffic in the tunnel and client management. Distributing IPSec clients to remote machines and configuring them for access is challenging, especially when the IT department does not have easy access to remote computers. Further, because they operate at the network level, IPSec VPNs effectively provide the remote personal computer with full network visibility, as if it were a computer located on the corporate local area network. Policy enforcement and security controls cannot be easily applied in this model. For these reasons, remote access IPSec VPNs typically result in a high total cost of ownership.

The Business Impact

With IPSec, the corporate IT department dictates the technology used on both ends of the tunnel. This makes remote access an expensive proposition. To control the cost, IT organizations have had to restrict the number of users and to protect the integrity of the data they insist on provisioning company owned laptops. These virtually incompatible goals limit the productivity benefits they were intended to deliver and introduce unnecessary acquisition costs and complicate IT operational support and maintenance.

More importantly, few companies are willing or able to mandate the technology their business partners or customers use and this limits the extranet capabilities of an IPSec VPN.

The SSL VPN Solution

Caveo Technology Group launched its AccessAnywhere appliance with the vision of providing a hardened application access gateway that fits seamlessly into heterogeneous data centers. These data centers are often comprised of legacy and client/server applications, UNIX/Linux servers, or OS390 and AS/400 machines as well as web applications that reside on intranet web servers. For companies seeking to provide secure remote access for employees and business partners, the challenge is to provide access to these critical legacy applications in a simple way that provides the same access-on-demand as they get for their web-enabled applications.

The AccessAnywhere consolidates three application-access technologies into a single application-layer gateway device:

• Customer Connection: Clientless, browser-based access to remote legacy and client/server applications
  
• Partner Integration: Secure intranet access to web-based applications and portals
  
• Employee Productivity: Desktop access to client/server and legacy applications

AccessAnywhere provides a plug-n-play alternative to traditional methods of secure remote access for mobile users or for partners/customers. Because AccessAnywhere requires no client to deploy or install, and requires no changes to internal servers, it radically reduce total cost of ownership and increase productivity and security.

Customer Connection: Clientless access to legacy applications

The AccessAnywhere appliance provides clientless, remote access to legacy applications through web-enabling technology directly from within the platform. In this approach, both the client and server portions of an application are centrally hosted in the corporate data centre. The key benefit of this approach is that remote users need only a browser to access these centrally located applications; no additional software or configuration of the remote PC is required.

Partner Integration: Intranet access to web-based applications and portals

AccessAnywhere provides clientless, browser-based access to web-based resources using HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) reverse-proxy technology. With this approach, a single point of entry over the Internet - the AccessAnywhere appliance - lets partners access back-end web servers securely through any web browser.

Employee Productivity: Desktop application access

Most sales people and executives need to use local client/server applications, such as e-mail or CRM programs that are already installed on their computers. These are typically local rich client applications that exchange data with backend host servers and support offline usage such as Microsoft's Outlook client and Exchange server for e-mail. These applications are localized on company-owned computers that are managed by the MIS staff. In these use cases a "VPN-on-demand" can be provided via SSL tunnelling technology in the AccessAnywhere product.