SonicWall Releases SSL VPN 5.0

Network security and data protection solutions specialist SonicWall announced the availability of SSL VPN 5.0 for its Secure Remote Access (SRA) 1200 and 4200 SSL VPN appliances. The firmware release from the company introduces High Availability and Layer-7 Load Balancing, designed to provide customers with remote access availability while allowing for flexible growth.
Accessible on a range of devices, smartphone users running Google Android, Apple iOS 4, Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems will also be able to access SonicWall’s reverse proxy and ActiveSync offerings. With the introduction of High Availability, IT managers and business owners will benefit from enhanced network uptime and performance using the Active-Passive configuration.
With load balancing features, these managers will be able to partition Web traffic across multiple servers while actively monitoring their responsiveness to better balance business-critical application usage. Additionally, with load balancing built directly into the SRA appliance, no further investment in additional hardware or software is needed for this functionality, the company stated in a release.
Key features of SSL VPN 5.0 include load balancing, which provides the ability to load-balance traffic for different types of applications such as Web, e-mail and other tools. SonicWall said in doing so, administrators can better balance network use and guarantee application scalability and redundancy. The solution also offers high availability, which allows two identical SRA 4200 appliances to be deployed in an Active-Passive configuration to form a high availability pair. This setup is designed to improve network reliability and improves uptime in the event of a hardware or software failure.
Also included in the platform is the Web Application Firewall (WAF), which provides support for custom rule sets that allow the administrator to create real-time, custom signatures that define the nature of Web traffic that should be allowed or denied. WAF Statistics now provide insight into prevented threats, the company noted.
“Today’s workers are no longer tethered to a desk. The office is wherever they need to work, and they cannot afford to be hindered by a lack of access to information they need,” said Patrick Sweeney, vice president of product management and corporate marketing at SonicWall. “With Load Balancing and High Availability, SonicWall provides enterprise-class features to SMB companies worldwide. We give employees in companies of all sizes the same level of access to the corporate network on the road that they’d have in the office. The SRA Series helps increase employee productivity and reduces the cost of providing network level as well as Web-application level security to customers.”