SonicWall Solutions for Clean VPN

For IT managers, there is a new type of virus to worry about: the real-world H1N1 or swine flu virus. Gartner Inc. suggests potential absenteeism rates of 40% of employees or higher projected to be affected by it. Clean VPN enables organizations and their employees to stay productive and avoid unnecessary exposure to the Swine Flu or H1N1 virus by safely teleworking from a home office.

SonicWall Clean VPN

SonicWall delivers the critical dual protection of SSL VPN and high-performance Unified Threat Management (UTM) necessary to secure both VPN access and traffic. This level of secure remote access helps organizations and their employees to stay productive and healthy during periods of business disruption by:

	Protecting the integrity of your VPN access by establishing trust for your remote users and their endpoint devices, using enforced authentication, data encryption, and granular access policy.
	Securing the integrity of your VPN traffic by establishing trust for this traffic, by cleaning and authorizing all inbound traffic for malware, and checking all outbound VPN traffic in real time

This dual protection of SonicWall Clean VPN provides a multi-layered approach that enables you to decrypt and decontaminate all authorised SSL VPN traffic before it enters your network environment.

Remote access = a strategic initiative

To remain competitive today and into the future, organizations must be able to conduct business from anywhere, anytime—especially during periods of crisis like the spread of Swine Flu. Secure remote access over SonicWall Clean VPN can safely extend a business network and deliver a multitude of benefits, all without jeopardizing an organization's integrity.

Workforce continuity With the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Gartner, Inc. anticipating up to 40% absentee rates, expect that many of your employees may stay home, either sick themselves or attending to a sick family member. Enforced travel restrictions may require your business to replace business travel and large gatherings with Web meetings, teleconferencing and virtual private networks (VPN). Disruptions to normal business operations often result in missed opportunities, lost revenue, and a damaged reputation. And swine flu is by no means the only threat. While hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis make the headlines, disruptions and disasters can be also be triggered by something as simple as a winter storm, power outage, hardware failure or any other event that keeps your workers from getting to the office or accessing vital business resources. Secure remote access is now a strategic imperative, enabling business to be safely conducted without being tied a particular physical office location.	Increase productivity Secure remote access broadens market opportunities and collaborative partnerships around the globe. Importantly, it also enables employees, contractors and outsourcers to be more productive through teleworking. According to "Economics of Teleworking" by Noel Hodson, the average worker spends the equivalent of 30 working days per year commuting, traveling, or engaging in office chit-chat. Converting some of this down time into productive time is a clear win for employers. At IBM, teleworking boosted employee productivity by about 20 percent. (Lisa Phifer. Business Communications Review. Hinsdale: Oct 2003. Vol. 33, Iss. 10; pg. 28)
Work green Secure remote access can help reduce carbon footprints and promote "working green" initiatives. Not only does safe remote access reduce the use of carbon-emitting vehicles like cars, trains and airplanes, but recent research by Sun reports its telecommuters use roughly half as much energy at home as they do in the office. (10 Trends and Technologies Driving Secure Telecommuting , Fact Point, 2008) According to the American Consumer Institute, the number of telecommuters could increase from 10% to 20% of the U.S. workforce over the next 10 years and reduce carbon emissions in the U.S. by 45 million tons annually. (Joseph Fuhr Jr. and Stephen Pociask, American Consumer Institute, 2007)	Collaborate with Web 2.0 Clean VPN empowers businesses of all sizes to capitalize on Web 2.0 technology to more cost-effectively increase productivity wherever businesses is conducted: from home, on the road, or at a customer site. For example, remote collaboration using Web 2.0 applications such as Web conferencing, wikis and VoIP, can reduce travel and communications expenses, reduce supply chain bottlenecks, enhance productivity and speed time-to-market. By uniquely integrating Comprehensive Anti-Spam Service with Gateway Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Intrusion Prevention, Application Firewall, Enforced Client Anti-Virus, and Content Filtering Services with SSL VPN, SonicWall Clean VPN delivers comprehensive, integrated protection against emerging Denial of Service (DoS) threats, such a Syn Flood, Ping of Death, LAND (IP) and VoIP spoofing attacks that can undermine collaborative Web 2.0 applications.
Efficiently manage workforce shifts In today's dynamic global marketplace, businesses need more flexibility so they can seamlessly react to shifts in workforce requirements. Secure remote access empowers businesses to quickly and easily provide network access to new and returning employees, contractors, consultants and other outsourced specialists as needed.

Remote access = risk of exposure

Modern business practices have extended users, endpoints, traffic and resources beyond the limits of the traditional network perimeter, shattering preconceived notions on the limits of productivity. But extending access to unmanaged environments also exposes your organization to security vulnerabilities in two crucial areas: your VPN access and your VPN traffic.

Integrity of your VPN access Your VPN is exposed to network hacks. And, handled improperly, a remote access connection can be compromised with user identities stolen, hacked, sniffed or inappropriately shared. Offering too much access opens your network to threats from non-employees, while too little access can hamper productivity with business partners. With ever-more sophisticated methods of gaining entry, savvy and financially-motivated criminal hackers have increased the risk of compromised data, systems downtime, reduced productivity, bandwidth consumption, and monetary theft.

Integrity of your VPN traffic Your VPN is also exposed to both inbound malware attacks and outbound data leaks that can potentially exploit the return VPN connection. Remote employees, partners, and contractors increasingly work on personal laptops, mobile devices, home PCs or public Internet kiosks at airports or hotels, using multiple operating systems and browsers that are outside the direct enforcement of IT policy. Remote users may not be aware of how to take proper security measures—such as critical security patches and anti-virus signature updates—on their own. Outbound data exposes your business to security risks for leaking confidential business data, such as financial records, customer databases, and intellectual property. Additionally, the unauthorized, inadvertent, or malicious transmittal of sensitive private information such as credit card, stock trading, or medical records can expose your organization to liability. Compliance legislation such as PCI, HIPAA and GLBA can mandate that only authorised users can gain access to authorised data, yet remote users may be less authorised on a personal device than when they are on the network LAN.

By securing the integrity of both your VPN access and VPN traffic, the SonicWall Clean VPN offers necessary defense-in-depth protection that allows you to control access based on how you establish trust for the user, for the device and for the traffic itself—all of which is necessary for a truly secure remote access.

SonicWall cleans up with Clean VPN

SonicWall has strategically positioned itself as an industry leader in pioneering Clean VPN technology solutions for organizations of all sizes, by enabling the managed integration of its award-winning Secure Remote Access, Network Security Appliance and Global Management System product lines. SonicWall Clean VPN gives you the dual protection of both securing your remote access tunnel and decontaminating the traffic running over it.

Why SonicWall for Clean VPN?

Only SonicWall is capable of delivering a truly viable Clean VPN, because only SonicWall:

Detects integrity of the user SonicWall Clean VPN detects the integrity of users, endpoints as well as the traffic. However secure your remote access technology, there may still be potential for malicious packets to breach the network when connections are established from untrusted endpoints like home computers or kiosks. SonicWall Clean VPN enables all traffic to be scanned and decontaminated before traversing the data resource perimeter.	Eliminates performance bottlenecks SonicWall Clean VPN eliminates network security performance bottlenecks. SonicWall Clean VPN optimizes throughput and performance by leveraging ultra-performing multi-core architecture and SonicWall's patented Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection.
Connects authorised users SonicWall Clean VPN connects authorised users with appropriate resources seamlessly and easily, and in real time. SonicWall Clean VPN is designed to intelligently and seamlessly connect users to authorised resources based upon device interrogation, user authentication and access policy, while employing an access method and interface appropriate to the specific endpoint. SonicWall automatically matches their device capability to the appropriate level of access. Because users don't have to make complex configuration choices, they can easily switch between IT-managed laptops, home PCs, mobile PDAs and smartphones. The enterprise-class SonicWall Aventail E-Class SRA EX6000 and EX7000 overcome platform limitations by offering true granular access control over all endpoints—including Macintosh, Linux, and Windows Mobile devices.	Enables centralized VPN management SonicWall Clean VPN centralizes VPN security management using the SonicWall Global Management System (GSM) to generate comprehensive event reporting, proactive alerts, rapid forensic analyses and complete audit trails. Integrating dedicated security management oversight simplifies administration for greater ease-of-management, helps identify gaps or anomalous activity, and facilitates regulatory compliance audits regulations (e.g., HIPAA, GBLA, SOX and PCI).
Safeguards against malware SonicWall Clean VPN safeguards against malware threats on both inbound and outbound VPN traffic by seamlessly integrating next-generation firewall, intrusion prevention, anti-malware, application firewall and content filtering, and scanning multiple application types, including SMTP, POP3, IMAP, FTP, HTTP, NetBIOS, as well as all network layers.