Nokia Announces High Availability Virtual Private Network Security; VPN200 Series Now Enables Failover and Load Sharing Between VPNs

Business Wire, Sept 14, 1999

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 14, 1999--

Today at NetWorld Interop Nokia (NYSE:NOK) announced the addition of high availability virtual private networking (HA VPN) functionality in the VPN200 line of security appliances.

HA VPN marks the next iteration in creating a secure, reliable network infrastructure for conducting e-business and enables organizations to utilize the convenience and cost-effectiveness of the Internet. Nokia's HA VPN solution allows VPNs to failover if needed, thereby transparently increasing VPN availability to users, partners, customers and remote offices on the other side of the VPN.

"VPNs over the Internet will continue to be an area of growth for us," Said Rob Adams, Director of Security Engineering for USinternetworking, Inc. "Our customers rely on us to provide them with outsourced mission critical application solutions at the highest level of reliability and security. We have standardized on the Nokia platform, and the increased uptime and failover protection of highly available VPNs will help us continue to deliver on our promises."

"Downtime and non-secure data transfer can cost a company millions of dollars in lost revenue and erode customer faith," said Don Jaworski, vice president and general manager, Nokia IP Routing Group. "We have built the VPN200 to protect the very heart of an organization -- its communications infrastructure -- and ensure that it is always available to users by protecting against Internet reachability issues, link failures, and component failures."

Nokia VPN200

The Nokia VPN200 Series provides a simple and cost-effective way to deploy a VPN as an integrated part of the networking infrastructure for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and corporate users. Enterprises can use the Nokia VPN200 solution to link corporate departments and remote offices. Each VPN within the enterprise can offer a secure, private connection to other departments and offices within a company and, unlike other VPN products, every location has a fully firewalled local connection to the Internet.

The Nokia VPN200 now includes:

-- High Availability: enhancements to the Nokia IPSO operating

system allow redundancy, dynamic load sharing and failover to

protect against hardware and software failures, increase resource

utilization, reliability and efficiency in support of service

level agreements.

-- Network Management Upgrades: offers improved logging based on

severity, backup/restore functions and audit trail to increase

management flexibility, save time and enable users to quickly

locate and fix problems.

-- Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) Support: inclusion of a

VRRP MIB and VRRPv2 enhancements to improve interoperability with

SNMP management systems.

-- New Interface Support: introduction of ATM, HSSI and Token Ring

support protects customer investments and meets requirements of

ISPs and telcos.

Virtual Private Network Market

According to Infonetics Research, a total of five million sites worldwide will be networked with a VPN in 1999. Large organizations (more than 1,000 employees) will dominate VPN deployments in 1999, with small and medium-sized organizations coming on board in late 1999 and early 2000, as more packaged VPN services from service providers become available. In a recent Infonetics study titled "Access in the US 1999: The Big Picture" 67 percent of large organizations, 74 percent of medium-sized organizations and 56 percent of small organizations with LANs responded that they will deploy VPNs by 2000.

Nokia has established itself as the most popular hardware platform for running Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.'s best of breed virtual private network (VPN) software solution and together the companies claim a 42 percent share of the high end VPN market, according to Infonetics.

"The Nokia/Check Point appliance has a leading position in the market for VPN appliances because it fulfills the business need for secure networks regardless of a user's location," said Jeff Wilson, Director of Access Programs at Infonetics Research. "DSL rollout in the US, the rapid growth of the ENX in Europe and an increasingly mobile global workforce are fueling the need for VPN appliances like this."

About Nokia

Nokia is paving the way to the mobile information society with its innovative products and solutions. Nokia is the leading mobile phone supplier and a leading supplier of mobile, fixed and IP networks including related services. It also supplies multimedia terminals and computer displays. In 1998, net sales totaled EUR 13.3 billion (USD 15.7 billion). Headquartered in Finland, Nokia is listed on the New York (NOK), Helsinki, Stockholm, London, Frankfurt and Paris stock exchanges and employs more than 51,000 people. Visit us at www.nokia.com.