Extending Aventail's Secure Remote Access Solution to Mobile Devices and Smartphones Is Ideal for Today's Corporate Mobility and Security Strategies

Market Wire, May, 2007

For organizations with a mobile workforce, extending today's secure remote access solutions from laptops and remote desktops to mobile devices like smartphones is an ideal way to securely support an organization's mobility strategy, according to leading industry analyst Mark Bouchard. In a technical note titled "Getting Smart About Smartphone Security," Bouchard, the founder of Missing Link Security Services LLC, outlines today's mobile phone security considerations and the advantages of using the same SSL VPN to support both smartphones and other computing devices such as laptops and remote desktops. The technical note is available at http://www.aventail.com/Smartphone

"Smartphones have become a mainstream part of today's mobile devices," said Bouchard. "And with smartphones and PDAs increasingly attaining laptop-like levels of functionality, they now have a risk profile approaching that of laptops, especially in the area of corporate email. Consequently, it is now time to start treating smartphones in a manner similar to laptops when it comes to information security. A logical first step is to extend the capabilities of existing SSL VPNs to mobile devices."

The smartphone market is growing by over 50% per year, with unit sales of over 50 million projected for 2007. Users utilize their smartphones for a variety of communications tasks, with the primary use being email. Security risks -- whether it be from viruses, lost or stolen devices or otherwise compromised situations -- have dramatically increased, and now must be considered when planning an organization's mobile security strategy. Bouchard outlines a full range of security capabilities that needs to be evaluated, and recommends that secure communications / connections and user authentication in particular get priority since protecting the network and its resources is more crucial than protecting any single device.

"The ideal solution will be one where the same VPN that is already being used to support other devices, such as laptops and remote desktops, can also be used to fully support an organization's smartphones," writes Bouchard. This approach would not only provide necessary encryption, user authentication, device health checking and granular access controls for smartphone users, but would also make it easier for both end users and administrators, while reducing infrastructure costs by leveraging a common solution.

About Aventail Connect Mobile for Smartphones

With the recent release of Aventail Connect Mobile for smartphones, Aventail is the only secure remote access provider to fully support all remote access including laptops, kiosks, home computers, Windows Mobile PDAs, and now Windows Mobile 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. More information on the recent release of Connect Mobile can be found at: http://www.aventail.com/SecureMobile

About Aventail

Aventail is the best-of-breed remote access company. Aventail delivered the first SSL VPN solution in 1997 and today is a market leader, delivering a remote access control solution that is the easiest to use and easiest to control. Aventail SSL VPN appliances provide users with transparent, clientless access to more applications from more devices via any network environment. For network managers, Aventail delivers a single secure access gateway for all users, internal and external, to all network resources with complete security. With more than 2.5 million end users around the globe, Aventail is the SSL VPN of choice among mid-sized to large-sized organizations worldwide, including AT&T, Chicago Housing Authority, DePaul University, DuPont, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), IBM Global Services, James Richardson International, Mississippi Department of Corrections, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Overlake Hospital, Radiology Ltd., and Sanyo. For more information, go to www.aventail.com .

Media contacts: Valerie Chan: (206) 856-7885 Sarah Daniels: (206) 579-0955 Aventail Corporation Email Contact