Multiplatform support

Although Windows is the main client platform for these VPN products, we found some grudging support for Macintosh and Unix. However, even that support was not unqualified. For example, there was no link to a built-in firewall in Cisco’s Macintosh client, which means that if your security policy said “personal firewall must be present in this group,” then any Mac OS user in that group wouldn’t be allowed to connect.

ActiveLane, Avaya, Cylink, Imperito, NetScreen, Secure Computing, SonicWall and Symantec had no software clients for anything other than Windows platforms. Of these Windowscentric, only Avaya offered a true hardware client to handle those non-Windows platforms.

Cisco and Check Point were willing to reach out to Macintosh and Unix communities with clients for those platforms, as well as fairly slick hardware client implementations.