Xerox International Partners (XIP) is a global organization that resells printers to business customers. Users at its offices in Europe, Asia, and the United States all need access to its data center in Palo Alto, California for financial management and other applications, and they use VPN connections to get it. But when the overhead involved in managing legacy IPsec VPN clients got out of hand, the company turned to NeoAccel’s SSL VPN Plus solution.
Client Configuration Woes
“We had been using Check Point VPN-1 and SecureClient for IPsec VPN access to our Oracle 11i Financials and other applications, but users needed to have the client installed on their systems,” says Prabakar Narayan, network consultant at Xerox International Partners. “Managing that process was pretty cumbersome.
Any change in personnel at one of our six locations meant installing and configuring a new client, and the process was taking more of our time than we wanted.”
To find a better solution, XIP evaluated products from Check Point, SonicWall, and NeoAccel, and decided to deploy NeoAccel’s SSL VPN-Plus gateway. “We have known about SSL VPN solutions for a long time, but they had a reputation for poor performance, and we couldn’t take the chance that our application response times would suffer,” Narayan says. “NeoAccel showed us that we didn’t have to compromise.”
SSL Simplicity with IPsec Performance
The SSL solution from NeoAccel eliminated XIP’s management labor with clientless, browser-based access, and it provided IPsec-level performance for remote users regardless of their locations or the speed of their individual Internet connections. NeoAccel’s patented single-connection TCP processing eliminates the “nested TCP” structure of other SSL VPN solutions to deliver up to 80 times improvement in performance over leading vendors. “The speed is definitely better,” says Narayan. “Our users often feel that they’re even getting faster response times than they did with our old IPsec system.”
In addition to its simplicity and performance, the NeoAccel solution allows XIP to restrict access on a userspecific level. After a user logs on with SSL VPN-Plus and is authenticated, the system automatically checks that user’s credentials against a policy database and then grants the user access to only the specific servers and applications where the user is authorized – another task that was cumbersome using the old IPsec solution.
Although SSL VPN-Plus also performs endpoint security checks to verify updated virus and security settings on remote user systems, Narayan says that other security systems in place also perform that function.
Currently, the SSL VPN-Plus system supports 75 users, but the SGX-2400 model gateway can support up to 2000 concurrent connections, so XIP has plenty of room to expand access as necessary. “The NeoAccel solution allowed us to simplify remote access, improve security, reduce management overhead, and deliver a better user experience – all with a product that we could deploy in a couple of hours” says Narayan. “I wish all of our upgrades were this successful.”
