The Menninger Clinic was the first group psychiatry practice in the United States and is perennially listed as one of the top 10 psychiatric hospitals in the country. Now based in Houston, Texas, the clinic has provided treatment for more than 250,000 patients from the United States and around the world since its founding in 1925.
To maintain its world-class reputation and deliver the broadest services to the community, the clinic has dozens of remote network users who access marketing, medical, and other information while away from its multi-facility campus in Houston.
Remote Access Overhead
Although the clinic has used an IPSec VPN solution since 2003, it has become an increasing burden to support as the user base grew.
“The old solution gave our remote users reliable and secure tunneling into our home network, but it required fairly high maintenance effort and associated costs,” says Terry Janis, the Menninger Clinic’s director of information technology. The clinic may have had up to 25 remote users at any one time, and different users— traveling lecturers, marketing personnel, or application developers, for example—may need different classes of access privileges. “Our IT staff had to continually update these remote systems to ensure appropriate security with the latest virus and operating system patches,” Janis adds.
NeoAccel’s Solution
When Janis and his staff reviewed NeoAccel’s SSL VPN-Plus in October 2006 as a potential replacement for their existing IPSec solution, they were immediately impressed. Based on a brief proof-of-concept, the IT staff approved the new solution and deployed it within one month. The new deployment includes two NeoAccel SSL VPN-Plus SGX-1200 appliances in a redundant failover configuration to ensure 100% remote connectivity.
Depending on the level of access provided, the IT staff offers full-client, thin-client, and clientless connectivity to remote users. “We liked the idea that we could offer four types of access in one product to support any type of application, rather than having to buy four different products,” says Janis.
If deployment was fast, flexible, and straightforward, the benefits were dramatic. “SSL VPN-Plus gives our users the ability to tunnel in from inside any other site’s firewall, which was often a problem with our IPSec product,” said Janis. In addition, SSL VPN-Plus’ automatically performs endpoint security checks on all remote users and informs them of updates to ensure compliance with the latest operating system security settings and virus patches. “The product is far easier to manage than the old system,” added Janis, “The management GUI interface is very intuitive.”
In addition, the new SSL VPN solution offers very high performance, and the clinic’s remote users liked the improvement. Unlike other SSL VPN solutions that are markedly slower than IPSec VPN connections, SSL VPN-Plus offers comparable or superior connection speed to IPSec. “All of our users immediately noticed that their speed of network access was much faster with SSL VPN-Plus than it had been with the old product,” said Janis. “We have some remote developers building a new application for us, and they have really noticed the speed improvement in particular.”
Healing Remote Access at the Menninger Clinic
