Aventail Announces the First Mobile SSL VPN for Smartphones

On May 14, 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." -Aventail