City Utilities of Springfield Selects SafeWeb's SSL-VPN To Deliver Secure Access to Corporate Information

Business Wire, April 1, 2003

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

EMERYVILLE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 1, 2003

SafeWeb, Inc., a leading provider of secure remote access technologies, today announced that City Utilities of Springfield has chosen SafeWeb's Secure Extranet Appliance (SEA Tsunami) to provide its remote employees, customers and vendors with secure remote access to internal corporate data and applications. City Utilities of Springfield is a progressive, customer-owned utility serving Southwest Missouri for more than 50 years with electricity, natural gas, water, and public transportation services.

"The SEA Tsunami enables us to quickly and easily establish a secure portal through which our remote employees, customers and vendors can seamlessly access selected network resources such as email, newsletters and corporate information. Fine grain access control allows us to hand-pick each user's access rights, without incurring the cost and headache of client software installation and management," said Jeff Bertholdi, Director-Network Operations. "In just four months the SEA Tsunami has begun to pay for itself by enabling us to significantly decrease administrative overhead, employee overtime and travel expenses and has led to happier employees."

Previously, City Utilities was using a traditional IPSec VPN to provide remote users access to its corporate network. The IPSec VPN model with specialized software proved too complex to easily integrate with a wide variety of personal workstations and equipment. Instead of imposing new proprietary technologies, the SEA Tsunami uses the existing Internet, standard browsers and banking grade SSL encryption to eliminate most of the costs of implementation, roll-out, training, upgrade and additional support. Today, City Utilities uses the IPSec VPN as a backup to the easy-to-use SEA Tsunami. City Utilities uses the SEA Tsunami to provide remote users with secure access to its corporate network including Telnet and FTP applications.

"City Utilities ran into the inherent limitations of IPSev VPNs in terms of complexity and cost that the SafeWeb's SEA Tsunami solves by using universal Web browsers in lieu of proprietary technologies. This is also a good example of how SafeWeb's SSL-VPN seamlessly integrates with both existing network applications and IPSec VPNs," said Jon Chun, CEO of SafeWeb. "Most importantly, the real benefits of SafeWeb's SSL-VPN are summarized by the rapid ROI City Utilities experienced."

About SafeWeb

SafeWeb designs secure remote access solutions that are effective, economical, and simple. Its mission is to drastically reduce the cost and complexity of securing corporate network resources for remote access. SafeWeb has been developing its award-winning technology since late 1999 and is a pioneer in SSL-VPN appliances. The SEA Tsunami is a clientless SSL-based VPN appliance that enables companies to quickly and easily deploy secure extranets within hours instead of weeks or months.