Secure remote access usage increasing 4 April, 2007 By Vanessa Ho

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The survey interviewed 604 IT decision-makers and 85 per cent of them said that they plan on adding secure remote access solutions over the next 12 months into their organization.

"Secure remote access has been growing over the last five years and this survey is telling us it is continuing to grow," said Sarah Daniels, vice president of marketing for Aventail.

According to the survey, most organizations already have significant experience with secure remote access solutions, with more than 50 per cent already supporting at least some remote access for teleworkers, traveling employees, home computer users, wireless LAN users, and mobile device users.

In fact, the survey noted that the increase use of mobile devices is the number two challenge facing IT today.

"IT folks are scared about all their users getting all these mobile devices and most companies aren't ahead of the curve in terms of creating mobile device security policies," said Daniels.

The survey revealed that security continues to be the number one challenge facing IT and the number one criteria in making a decision to purchase a secure remote access solution. 98 per cent of respondents rated security as an extremely or very important criteria.

Robert Whiteley, senior analyst with enterprise networking with Forrester Research, Inc., added that while security is important, a clear trend lately is the concept of ease of use and ease of management with secure remote access solutions.

"Ease of use is about as being as transparent to the end users as possible. They don't want to be thinking about their VPN connection," Whiteley said. "The huge order of magnitude comes with ease of management," he added.

Whiteley said that ease of management is all about creating templates, wizards and pre-populating the more common configuration tasks and also about auto discovery where the devices not only discover each other but also applications.

"A lot of it is around having object driven policy where each user needs to have a unique policy based on user, device, time of day and applications they need. That is great and powerful but at the same time it is complex and to be able to expose all of that configurability in an intuitive object driven manner becomes really critical," he said.

Both Whiteley and Daniels suggested that companies adopt such secure remote access solutions as SSL VPN or use encryption and digital certificates that can be revoked should a mobile device get lost or stolen to ensure that corporate data is secure.

As well, Daniels added that corporations need to work very quickly to create mobile corporate policies.

In addition to supporting teleworkers and mobile device users, IT managers are increasingly adopting secure remote access solutions to help with disaster recovery and compliance.

The survey also noted that IT managers rely on their peers as the number source for credible information. Whiteley said that companies that aren't early adopters of technologies such as SSL VPN rely on case studies and reaching out to peers who have already implemented the technology for advice.

"Peer relations have proven that SSL VPN has become a mainstream technology not from a market share perspective but from a mindshare and it will continue to grow to become a little more ubiquitous than IPSec," Whiteley said.

A key takeaway from the Aventail survey, said Daniels, is that IT managers can take a look at the results and either see that they are up with their peers in investing and figuring out how to use remote access in all of the different use cases or the results will be a wake up call.

"[These IT managers], if they don't invest in remote access, may see that their company may not be as productive or secure as its competitors," she added.