Start-up enKoo is coming out with a low-cost remote-access appliance based on Secure Sockets Layer that might not have all the bells and whistles of other such gear, but does offer customers practical means for accessing important data.

The company's enKoo 1000 and 2000 appliances require remote machines to have an SSL-enabled Web browser to gain access to commonly used applications and files.

Other vendors, such as Aventail, NetScreen Technologies and Whale Communications, offer similar features with their products. They also support stronger authentication options than enKoo does, and verify whether remote machines are configured to meet security rules, things enKoo cannot do. The other vendors' gear also costs more.

Pricing for the enKoo 1000 starts at $1,000 for a box with a 10-user license and ranges up to $10,000 for an enKoo 2000 with a license for 500 users. Pricing for a NetScreen SSL appliance costs about $10,000 for 50 users.

The enKoo appliances sit behind corporate firewalls and are accessed via SSL from remote Web browsers that use firewall ports, which are commonly left open for secure Web access. Traffic is tunneled over the Internet to the enKoo devices, which proxy requests to the appropriate LAN machines.

Remote users can access files they are authorized to share, reach individual desktops via a remote-control agent and access any e-mail server using the full e-mail client on the remote machine rather than a Web client that has less functionality, says Ajit Deora, enKoo's CEO.

The device lets Jordan Archer, owner of independent software engineering firm Windspear, securely access data at his home office in San Jose from machines behind firewalls at customer sites. He says that before he started using enKoo gear about four months ago, it was difficult to get data he needed through those firewalls.

Archer says Windspear maintained a separate Linux server outside the company firewall containing data he might want to access when he traveled, avoiding the problem of accessing data through his own firewall. "[The Linux server] was exposed to the world," he says of the data. He tried a Netgear firewall/VPN appliance, but found the VPN too difficult to configure. "I never did figure it out," he says.