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Are the VPN Alternatives Enterprise Ready?

Posted by Cliff on from the waiting-for-maturity dept.

steve asks: "There has been some talk about the newer alternative to true VPN lately. Are products like Netilla or Neoteris enough to replace the typical 'extranet'. most are based on simple SSL technology and somewhat limited in what applications you can run or use them for but they do give a simple web based interface. Has anyone out there played with any of these? Are they truly worth a look yet? Would you be concerned about potential browser issues (security or otherwise) creating a back door on your nice firewall?"

1 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds interesting! by balamw · · Score: 3, Interesting
    We've been using a Compatible Systems Intraport 2 (now aka Cisco VPN5000, and end of lifed) for IPSec based VPN services for a few years now. The number one problem we've had is the clients establish a good connection, but then clients can't seem to be able to resolve names reliably using WINS, so they need to hardcode some of our server addresses in LMHOSTS. (NOTE: Recent clients seem far more robust in this respect).

    So, the very people who should be using it, users out in the field won't because they have been burned before. So, I was recently setting up IMAP/SSL and OWA/SSL access to our email server using stunnel as a backup, in case the VPN client doesn't feel like resolving names.

    They seem to like this, so I was also looking at using one of the many variants on smb2www over SSL to provide backup access to our NT file servers, but I wanted to limit what servers and shares they could see this way from the outside. If these products can do that, then I might just recommend them for our company!

    Balam