Aventail SSL VPNs are first to support Microsoft Internet Explorer 7

Aventail announced that its Aventail ST2 SSL VPN officially supports Microsoft IE7. While other major SSL VPN vendors, such as Juniper and F5, have been forced in recent days to advise their customers not to upgrade to IE7 because of incompatibility with their VPN products, Aventail is encouraging its customers to upgrade and take advantage of all the new security and ease of use features in IE7.

Seamless support of IE7 is an imperative for maintaining a productive mobile workforce, since over 3 million people downloaded the new browser in the first four days following its October 18, 2006 release.  Many more users’ browsers will be automatically updated now that IE7 has gone into Windows XP Automatic Update mode as of November 1st. Any SSL VPN solutions that do not support Microsoft IE7 will fail to be able to connect those users to their corporate resources.

“As the technology leader in SSL VPNs, our customer base expects us to enable secure remote access from any device— and that clearly includes PCs running IE7,” stated Chris Hopen, CTO, Aventail. “We made it our business to understand the changes that Microsoft was making, and to invest ahead of the curve to support them.”

A key component of Microsoft’s strategy to protect Windows-based PC’s from malware infestation has been to restrict the ability to install software, especially without the end user’s knowledge or acceptance—an area which significantly impacts products such as SSL VPNs. Aventail began to make these changes in early 2006 when Microsoft’s guidelines on how to write successful code in this new Windows environment were released, and subsequently Aventail’s SSL VPN is the industry’s first SSL VPN to perform well with the newly released IE7. By continuing to respond to strategic Microsoft initiatives that will affect their SSL VPN customers, Aventail also anticipates early support for Vista when it ships.