Features likely to be of significant interest to the partner community include new Android on-demand capability, as well as deployment capability on AWS as well as Azure.
Pulse Connect Secure 9.0
Today, secure access solution vendor Pulse Secure is announcing the release of Pulse Connect Secure 9.0. The new release includes 102 new features and enhancements. They include broader user and device visibility, secure access to Amazon AWS hosted applications, and extended endpoint compliance for MacOS computers and Android mobile devices.
“Pulse Connect Secure 9.0 is a major release of our portfolio, which has three overarching themes,” said Prakash Mana, vice president of product management at Pulse Secure. “Our security is focused on seamless access, so enhancing user experience has been our top priority. We have been emphasizing the hybrid IT journey, so we have optimized our secure access for hybrid cloud. As new threats have resulted in new regulations, we have also strengthened our security and compliance posture.”
Enhanced visibility is a major component of better user experience.
“At the platform level, we have taken into consideration two different use cases,” Mana said. “Organizations with distributed infrastructure want to collect visibility in each and every location, to get a full 360-degree view, and there could also be companies that have small branch office-like locations. Now you can monitor all the branch locations individually, and from a central location, can see all the patterns. As the portfolio has evolved, we have also started adding an additional level of visibility, and this release has better application visibility to allow view of user experience. It lets you take proactive measures before users see any productivity loss.”
With this release, Pulse One now also provides greater visibility for user devices and networks. This includes on-demand VPN for Android devices using Pulse Workspace, offering a secure, easy-to-manage and remotely wipeable device container.
“We will be the first to deliver and on-demand experience on the Android platform, which is 70 per cent of the market,” Mana said. “Our partner community with a mobile focus will find this Android on-demand capability to be very useful. Nobody else delivers that experience today. There’s a great opportunity there.”
The 9.0 release also enhances security for MacOS with expanded device compliance functionality and Always-On VPN.
“This provides a lockdown mode, which is especially important in financials and highly regulated industries,” Mana noted.
The release also provides support for the latest versions of Windows, Mac, Android and iOS.
API capabilities have been enhanced in this release as well.
“Our move to a RESTful API infrastructure will make it easier for partners and customers generally, but in addition we have also been expanding availability to have both northbound and southbound APIs, so as to let partners better integrate solutions,” Mana indicated. “We have built out application templates and cloud templates that allow partners to easily orchestrate workloads and quickly provision the most frequently-used applications.”
Mana also stressed the importance of Pulse Connect Secure 9.0’s launch of Virtual Editions
“Partners will have the ability to consumer these on Pulse Connect Secure virtual platforms with the exact same features,” he said. “We have also now taken these virtual appliances and made them available in both the AWS cloud as well as Azure. For cloud centred partners, this availability on both AWS and Azure gives them new ways to deliver solutions to their customers. And the virtual appliances let them deliver the same functionality but in a better CAPEX/OPEX mode and with more deployment flexibility.”
Other enhancements including adding fully qualified domain name (FQDN) split-VPN tunneling and console wizard support for Always-On VPN, providing virtual appliance clustering and provisioning support for WAN-based clusters, and enhancing the browser-based user experience with improved support for HTML5 RDP users and optimized rewriter support for JavaScript.
Pulse Connect Secure 9.0 is available now.
