Pulse Secure, the leader in next generation secure access solutions for enterprises and service providers, recently introduced a family of Pulse Secure Appliances built to power its Next Generation Secure Access framework that helps companies blend cloud services and data center applications into a seamless enterprise user experience.
Mobile applications and cloud services
Mobile applications and cloud services are redefining the enterprise user experience giving workers anytime access to the corporate information they need with the productivity applications they want. Gartner reports that, “in today's digital workplace, knowledge workers use, on average, three different devices in their daily routine. This will increase to five or six devices with the advent of technologies such as wearable devices and the Internet of Things (IoT) eventually becoming mainstream. Gartner forecasts mobile phone sales of 2.1 billion units by 2019, which will fuel demand for apps in the enterprise that meet the high performance and usability of consumer apps.”
The days of using a single secure data pipe to the datacenter are over. While per-app VPN connectivity from mobile devices strains the corporate network, companies increasingly look to the cloud to help deliver service capacity and eliminate operational overhead. Gartner named cloud as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2015 stating that “cloud is the new style of elastically scalable, self-service computing, and both internal applications and external applications will be built on this new style.” In this new IT world, enterprises need a way to seamlessly blend cloud services such as Office 365 with their existing application without compromising corporate security and compliance standards.
The new Pulse Secure appliance
Basic VPN solutions designed for simple access to the datacenter lack the intelligence and features required by enterprises to use the cloud where they can, the datacenter where they must and mobile for everything. The new Pulse Secure Appliance and the availability of its centralised management console, Pulse One, helps enterprise boost network access performance and scale enabling a fully mobile workforce and delivering the seamless user experience workers demand.
The Pulse Secure Appliance series provides enterprises with increased performance, control and versatility to address both the practical and strategic. The multi-service hardware appliance supports Pulse Connect Secure (VPN) and Pulse Policy Secure (NAC), and is ideal for both larger enterprises looking to scale and smaller entities with only one box to manage. Pulse Secure also provides the deployment flexibility to support its advanced secure access capabilities as a virtual appliance.
The new hardware appliance comes in three scalable sizes, PSA3000, PSA5000 and PSA7000. Their scale and versatility are designed for different operational environments. The PSA3000 is ideal for branch office applications with support for two 1G interfaces and scale up to 200 concurrent VPN sessions. The PSA5000 is targeted for medium sized enterprises that require 2500 concurrent sessions connected via two 1G interfaces. Large enterprises with mission critical applications can rely on the PSA7000 that scales to 35,000 concurrent sessions, supports two 1G/10G copper or two 10G fiber interfaces with SSL acceleration and delivers maximum reliability with link redundancy, hot-swappable redundant hard disks (RAID 1), and hot-swappable redundant power supplies. The Pulse Secure Appliance series provides three times the performance of SA Series SSL VPN Virtual Appliances and can be clustered to further boost performance by two to four times depending on the type of appliance deployed.
Designed to work with Pulse One software
Pulse Secure Appliances are designed to work with Pulse One, a Software-as-a-Service management offering that provides an easy-to-deploy solution that unifies virtual private network, network access control and enterprise mobility management. With Pulse One, IT administrators are able to centrally manage all Pulse Secure Appliances, manage endpoint and mobile device security policies, report on appliance and device health, and mass-provision workspace and appliance policies and configuration.
“Our next generation secure access framework powered by the Pulse Secure Appliance series will help our customers do more with less,” said Pulse Secure’s newly appointed CEO, Sudhakar Ramakrishna. “The launch of the Pulse Secure Appliance series helps enterprises boost their networks to mobilise their entire workforce and enabling the use of new applications and services to transform business productivity. We are building a foundation that enables businesses of all sizes to boost performance and do more with less by consolidating their datacenters with fewer appliances and utilising a single cloud-based console for control.”
Pulse Secure gold and platinum protection services
Access to real time business intelligence and enterprise services is critical to workers and their corporate success. In addition to robust and reliable access solutions, Pulse Secure Gold and Platinum Protection Services provide hardware and software support that ensure that enterprise applications and services are always on for mobile users. Designed to meet the diverse support needs of each enterprise, Pulse Protection services can be tailored from a menu of services that include the industry’s fasted response time for Priority 1 issues, skip-tier support for quick access to product experts and quarterly business reviews for planning and optimisation.
