Pulse Secure simplifies and extends secure access

“Business digital transformation is pushing IT to support a variety of device, application and data protection requisites. As such, many enterprises have applied siloed or work-around components for Secure Access, using different application gateways, cloud access brokers, app wrapping, cloud authentication and virtual load balancing, which can result in disparate policies, management blind spots and a cumbersome user experience,” said Maxine Holt, research director, information security at Ovum. “Pulse Secure provides IT with a facility to ensure consistent user, role, device and stateful policy-management across computing environments, whether a business is fully hybrid IT invested or moving to the cloud on a per app and business case.” 

As organizations migrate to hybrid IT and accelerate multi-cloud IT service delivery, protecting the connectivity and assuring the authorized access between their mobile workforce and the mix of data center, cloud hosted, and SaaS applications and resources introduce an array of usability and security challenges. For its more than 20,000 enterprise customers, Pulse Secure’s new release enables an easier transformation of their trusted and reliable virtual private network (VPN) environment into a flexible and scalable Secure Access solution that adapts to the cloud-extended data center and the panoply of BYOD and IOT devices. More so, the release continues to offer frictionless, single-sign on connectivity, between data center and cloud applications, that users enjoy and IT support staff welcome.

Pulse Connect Secure 9.0 ships with management console enhancements that provide IT administrators and security operators extensive user and device visibility with the means to dynamically manage policy based on device security state, user role, application, resource or authentication requirements whether on premise or in the cloud. The release brings additional API capabilities to further integration with other IT systems.

The release also extends Secure Access to a wider set of devices. It allows on-demand VPN for Android devices using Pulse Workspace offering a secure, easy-to-manage and remotely wipeable device container.  This innovation elevates the world’s most popular mobile devices to true enterprise class security. The release enhances security for MacOS with expanded device compliance functionality and Always-On VPN with lockdown control of internet traffic, keeping enterprise users secure no matter their location. Pulse Connect Secure 9.0 also extends endpoint vulnerability assessment to help IT prevent malware propagation such as the WannaCry ransomware.

Pulse Connect Secure 9.0 can be deployed within the data center on a virtual or physical appliance, or as a cloud service when securing public cloud deployments for Microsoft Azure and now for Amazon AWS.  Since the solution offers unified appliance and policy management, it can be readily scaled-out without disrupting users, changing security policies or retraining administrators. Designed for hybrid IT test environments, the new release also enhances predictable operation and elasticity with new high availability capacity for virtual appliances and on-demand user licensing shared among appliances.

"Pulse Secure continues to focus on building Secure Access solutions that improve the productivity of IT administrators and the end users they support, while at the same time allowing enterprises to take advantage of hybrid IT," said Prakash Mana, vice president of product management at Pulse Secure.  "This release demonstrates our commitment to systems usability and consistent protection by helping IT secure more devices that users care about, and in this case, making both Android and Macintosh users happy. We also help make the administrator’s job easier and more efficient with new features, such as domain-based management of cloud services, Always-on VPN wizard, and vulnerability checking. It all contributes to a better user experience and secure connectivity that is easier to provision, manage and scale.”

In addition, Pulse Connect Secure Release 9.0:

·         Simplifies management of cloud, SaaS and data center access with fully qualified domain name (FQDN) split-VPN tunneling and console wizard support for Always-On VPN

·         Boosts appliance performance and reliability with virtual appliance clustering and provisioning support for WAN-based clusters

·         Enhances the browser-based user experience with improved support for HTML5 RDP users and optimized rewriter support for JavaScript