Pulse Secure’s flagship access joins their vADC in the Azure cloud, broadening their hybrid cloud strategy which already had a fuller AWS presence.
Secure access solution provider Pulse Secure has announced the broadening of their hybrid IT strategy, by announcing that their flagship Pulse Secure Access appliances have now been certified for Microsoft Azure, and are available in the Azure marketplace.
“For a lot of customers, the notion of what the data centre is has radically changed,” said Dan Dearing, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Pulse Secure. “They are blending traditional data centres with ones in hosted data centres and SaaS environments. They want to be able to have secure access in all these environments, and want to have secure access regardless of where the data is. The news here is that these customers can now take a platform they trust and know and migrate it along with their applications to Azure. So from a strategy standpoint, they have more flexibility, without disrupting the user base.”
Pulse Secure Access soluions had already been available for the AWS cloud. Pulse Secure also had product in the Azure cloud before now, but until now that has only been the vADC [Virtual Application Delivery Controller] solution it acquired from Brocade over a year ago.
“Now we are also putting out our core Pulse Secure product in Azure, and have made code changes to allow it to run there,” Dearing said.
Pulse Secure Access solutions deployed in the Azure cloud have feature parity with their physical and virtual appliances. They consist of integrated VPN), endpoint compliance, NAC, [Network Access Control] (NAC), mobile security, and vADC, to provide consistent usability, availability and security for a mobile workforce.
Dearing said that Pulse Secure does not think that it has left positioning Pulse Secure for the cloud too late.
“As an industry, we tend to talk about these things before customers do them in a big way,” he said. “That’s particularly the case with larger enterprises, which have been a little slower in moving to the cloud, and have run many of these solutions in the traditional data centre. Now, more of these customers are using Azure and AWS to host critical applications.”
Dearing said this additional flexibility in deployment options is critical for Pulse Secure channel partners.
“For partners, the move of customers to the cloud can put some of their revenue at risk, and the move to the Azure or AWS cloud could be accompanied by customers switching,” Dearing said. “Many have had angst about this issue. Being able to put Pulse Secure in the cloud gives them ability to remain relevant and core to customer needs. For the partner, it will also continue to be an opportunity on how to do migration in way that doesn’t disrupt the user. They can use this in a Bring Your Own License format, where they sell it and help upload it.”
Pulse Connect Secure in Azure is available today in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace as part of the Microsoft Azure Certified program. Three models are available, supporting 200, 2500 and 25000 concurrent sessions respectively.
