SonicWall, Aventail combo could bolster customer NAC options

SSL VPN gear from both companies will swap features

The marriage of SonicWall and Aventail could result in a new network access control vendor after the companies have the chance to assess and integrate their respective technologies.

While neither company sells NAC gear now, aspects of their SSL VPN equipment and security services lend themselves to reducing the risk that a device joining a network will harm the network - the cornerstone of NAC.

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The marriage of SonicWall and Aventail could result in a new network access control vendor after the companies have the chance to assess and integrate their respective technologies.

While neither company sells NAC gear now, aspects of their SSL VPN equipment and security services lend themselves to reducing the risk that a device joining a network will harm the network - the cornerstone of NAC.

SonicWall and Aventail cross pollenate With SonicWall's purchase of Aventail, technologies from each vendor's SSL VPN equipment will be integrated in the other's. Here is some of what each brings to the table that the other lacks. SonicWall: Aventail: Gateway antivirus and antispyware VPN Intrusion prevention Endpoint integrity checking URL filtering Support for multiple operating systems Distributed management software VPN support for certain smartphones Current and historical reporting High availability configuration   Scaling to the needs of the largest corporations

Click to see: SonicWall and Aventail merge

“Of course we have an interest in it,” says Evan Kaplan, founder and CEO of Aventail who stays on as SonicWall’s vice president of business development and alliances. “Much of the endpoint security we have today and the access control and the [intrusion-prevention system] stuff applies itself to NAC.”

SonicWall hopes to apply some of its basic product principles to NAC, such as making complex technologies easier to deploy and manage, says Patrick Sweeney, the vice president of the SonicWall secure business networking unit. “With Aventail’s knowledge base and SonicWall’s knowledge base, there’s some very smart things we’ll be able to do in that area,” Sweeney says.

Aventail brings with it endpoint control technology that lets customers grant separate access rights based on the trust they have in the machine being used to make the connection as well as other factors. The company also partners with Sygate and WholeSecurity to interrogate endpoints for security compliance before admitting them to networks, key NAC functions.

“Endpoint security is becoming much more of an absolute requirement - the ability to do real interrogation, real integrity checking and then differentiate policies.” Sweeney says. “Those are things we want not just in the SSL-VPN world but across all the user population.”

Aventail has a richer SSL VPN offering than SonicWall, but SonicWall gear is simpler to use, says Jeff Wilson, an analyst with Infonetics. “I’d suspect that they’ll use Aventail as their primary platform, but take a SonicWall style pass on ease of use and then bring it down to lower-end hardware platforms,” he says. “The Aventail platform just has deeper SSL VPN functionality, from client integrity, to mobile device support.”

On a less grand scale, the $25 million purchase of Aventail will result in the gradual incorporation of elements of Aventail’s high-end SSL VPN equipment into SonicWall’s small and midrange SSL VPN gear.

For instance, SonicWall supports gateway virus, spyware and intrusion protection that Aventail lacks. It also has a distributed management platform that, unlike Aventail’s management, spans multiple appliances and supports current and historical reports.