Manageability, Compatibility Top VPN Selection Criteria

By Tom Smith

Manageability and compatibility with other products are the two most important criteria that corporations are using in evaluating virtual private network appliances, according to a new study by In-Stat/MDR.

The company found that 73.4 percent of companies said manageability was most important, while 70.6 percent said compatibility with other equipment was critical. The study, which polled a total of 405 LAN managers in corporations of varying sizes, had a total of 405 responses.

Manageability of VPNs becomes especially important as the size and complexity mushrooms, typically a result of a greater number of remote workers, or a greater number of workers who travel and need to access the corporate network, said Jaclynn Bumback, research analyst at In-Stat/MDR. "When you have to connect all those people, manageability becomes really important," Bumback said.

Compatibility usually comes into play when companies are considering how easily they can deploy VPN gear, especially from the perspective of integrating that gear with existing software platforms as well as LAN and WAN hardware. "A company might have Cisco routers and then get a Cisco VPN," Bumback said.

Such thinking clearly is prevalent, as Cisco came out as the dominant supplier of stand-alone VPN devices to survey respondents, 48 percent of whom said their company uses Cisco VPN gear. The next-closest vendor they named was Nortel Networks, which posted a comparatively small 14 percent usage among respondents.

Other important VPN attributes cited by survey respondents were speed, listed by 70 percent; price, 67 percent; and customer support, 60 percent. (Multiple responses were allowed).

In another finding on companies' VPN preferences, In-Stat/MDR found that firewall software is the most commonly used type of firewall/VPN product used by companies, at 38 percent of respondents. The next highest percentage, 34 percent, use stand-alone firewall hardware devices, while 14 percent use combination firewall/VPN appliances.

Bumback said these are something of a legacy issue, as such firewalls represent the older generation of technology. Increasingly, companies are deploying combination firewall software/hardware, and vendors are increasingly adding in VPN communications functions. Increasingly too, companies are looking for the additional speed of having a dedicated hardware device that handles processing for functions such as encryption, she added.