The History of SSL VPNs
Organizations were looking to utilize the global connectivity aspects of the internet
to provide access to corporate resources. It started with customers and, of course,
employees traveling to do business between national or international sites, as the productivity
gains were both obvious and immediate.
There were few technologies that could provide this functionality.
The fi rst to arrive was dial-up access, which was rather costly. Dial-up is sometimes
the only choice available for most rural or remote areas where broadband provision is
unlikely due to low population and demand. Low access speeds mean that users have a
limited remote access experience connected to the corporate servers.
Using Intelligent Application Gateway 2007 ??? Chapter 8 303
Next, there was a wave of reverse proxies, publishing Web-based applications to the
outside world. An example of this would be the ISA Firewall??™s Web Publishing feature
set. This delivered value but was limited to Web-based applications. However, it did
add an additional layer of defense and encryption compared to previous remote
access solutions.
There followed a wave of IP security (IPsec) VPN solutions that transitioned from
the normal site to site solution to an encrypted client/server VPN. Employees got
complete access to the company network, as they had when sitting in front of their
corporate desktops. When connected over a faster Internet connection (for example,
an ISDN 128 Kbps line), the connected experience was immensely superior to dial-up
modem connections.
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