Aventail Announces SSL VPN Support for Internet Explorer 7

WebKnowHow
Tuesday, November 7, 2006; 06:11 AM

Aventail officially announced that its Aventail ST2 SSL VPN officially supports Microsoft IE7. According to Aventail, other major SSL VPN vendors, such as Juniper and F5, have been forced in recent days to advise their customers not to upgrade to IE7 because of incompatibility with their VPN products. Currently Aventail is encouraging its customers to upgrade and take advantage of all the new security and ease of use features in IE7.

Seamless support of IE7 is an imperative for maintaining a productive mobile workforce, since over 3 million people downloaded the new browser in the first four days following its October 18, 2006 release. Many more users' browsers will be automatically updated now that IE7 has gone into Windows XP Automatic Update mode as of November 1st. Any SSL VPN solutions that do not support Microsoft IE7 will fail to be able to connect those users to their corporate resources.

"As the technology leader in SSL VPNs, our customer base expects us to enable secure remote access from any device -- and that clearly includes PCs running IE7," stated Chris Hopen, CTO, Aventail. "We made it our business to understand the changes that Microsoft was making, and to invest ahead of the curve to support them."

With over 50% of the workforce working remotely at least some of the time and more than 80% of the market now standardizing on the Microsoft browser and Microsoft products, Aventail ensured that it worked closely with Microsoft to understand and build in support for the major changes Microsoft has made in its Internet security architecture, starting with Windows XP Service Pack 2, IE7 and Vista.

A key component of Microsoft's strategy to protect Windows-based PCs from malware infestation has been to restrict the ability to install software, especially without the end user's knowledge or acceptance -- an area which significantly impacts products such as SSL VPNs. Aventail began to make these changes in early 2006 when Microsoft's guidelines on how to write successful code in this new Windows environment were released, and subsequently Aventail's SSL VPN is the industry's first SSL VPN to perform well with the newly released IE7. By continuing to respond to strategic Microsoft initiatives that will affect their SSL VPN customers, Aventail said it also anticipates early support for Vista when it ships.