People who use VPNs continue to move toward devices that do more than just provide a VPN gateway in conjunction with a firewall, according to a new study by Synergy Research.

The reason for this shift is that users want to create easy to manage security gateways rather than spend the time and money to buy a string of individual products, coordinate their functions and manage them separately.

Sales of these hybrid devices that most often include a firewall, VPN, antivirus and intrusion detection, in the second quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, showed increases between 3% and 12%, depending on the category of device. Low-end devices were up 4% and high-end devices were up 12%, the study says.

Sales of SSL VPNs rose 29% from the same period last year, demonstrating the inroads this technology is gaining over IPSec VPNs, which are more and more being relegated to site-to-site uses as SSL takes over the remote access VPN role. Synergy predicts in the report that SSL VPNs will start to replace IPSec as well in site-to-site uses, surprising since many SSL VPN vendors don't support site-to-site deployments.

The main reasons for SSL's success are replacement of IPSec remote access gear as it ages and use of SSL as a method to screen users as they log on to local networks not just remotely. SSL is also being used as an overlay security method to protect traffic as it moves from wireless devices onto a wired network via Wi-Fi, the study says.

Next time we'll take a look at how Synergy says individual companies stack up among the SSL VPN vendors.

Tim Greene is senior editor at Network World.