Fortinet on Tuesday announced it will offer virtual private network client software that simplifies enterprise deployment of VPNs based on its Network Protection Gateway (NPG) security appliances.
The Fortinet Remote VPN Client software is a version of SSH Communications Security, Inc.'s SSH Sentinel VPN Client. Previously, Fortinet merely recommended VPN clients from vendors such as SafeWeb and the IPSec client that comes bundled in Windows, says Rick Kagan, vice president of marketing for Fortinet, based in Santa Clara, Calif.
Fortinet's NPG is a family of appliances that provide VPN function along with antivirus, content filtering, firewall, intrusion detection and traffic shaping. Since launching the NPG in May, Fortinet has sold about 5,000 of the boxes, Kagan says. The kind of large enterprises that are likely to deploy the boxes -- which have firewall speeds of up to 3G bps and 300M bps of IPSec VPN throughput with 3DES encryption -- typically have a large number of remote VPN users and need an easy way to distribute policy to them, Kagan says.
The Remote VPN Client allows an administrator to dictate policy, generate VPN client configurations, and store them on a central server. Administrators can then send users an email with the URL for the policy that applies to them, which users can then download from the server.
Additionally, the Fortinet/SSH client includes diagnostic tools and a built-in personal firewall, at what Kagan says is an attractive price -- less than $20 per seat in volumes of 2000.
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