I must be a bit crazy to take on more work, but after a fair amount of interest coming my way for a new SSL VPN book I have decided to go for it and now plan to write another one.   Target completion date: Q1, 2011.

So, what would you like me to include this time around?

Habit 7, “Sharpen the Saw”, from Stephen Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is in motion this week.  Once every quarter or so the product managers all get together for a few days of invigorating meetings (laptops closed) to focus on a few key areas that can greatly benefit all.  Many things will be discussed, a great deal learned, and the mind refreshed by highly qualified external and internal speakers.  Of course no good deed goes unpunished, so I will have a few days worth of e-mail to catch up on.  Still…worth it.

Feel free to sign up and join us for the March 25th webinar with Juniper and SecureAuth, where I will be co-presenting and highlighting some of the key aspects of SSL VPNs and healthcare portals.

Well, the Citrix Nirvana phone concept (http://bit.ly/b8Bceg) sure got my attention.  Without a doubt, this is a solution that we will see in the future.  Of course this appears to be the first version to actually work, but you can bet there will be others; perhaps with a much more elegant solution.  

I’m not going to dream or drool too much over this though, any more than I bought into the notion that web-based applications would spell the end of desktop installed applications or that Linux would crush Microsoft (within a decade, as many first declared with conviction).  I also know that I spend my days going from meeting to meeting and have a real need to carry a laptop around and would not like to get to a conference room only to find out that all of the keyboard/monitor settings were taken by others.  I also have this thing about using public keyboards (yuck!).  But in a perfect world, having this as a feature of my phone where I could have a virtual desktop security hosted and accessible through my phone in a pinch is a nice idea.  Just don’t look at me funny when I still carry my own keyboard around with me.

As we do a few times each year, we are changing the base image that ships with the hardware.  So, for all of the SA2500, SA4500 and SA6500 hardware, you can expect to start seeing 6.3R7.  For the SA4500FIPS and SA6500FIPS, we decided to base those all the way up at 6.5R2.

There’s a fairly common question that comes my way, which is: Do you ever plan to take the Secure Virtual Workspace (SVW) feature to the next level by making it a full Data Loss Prevention (DLP) feature.  And the answer is…no.

Let’s look at what each solution provides:

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A common question that we see is whether or not Juniper Secure Meeting will be upgraded anytime soon to take on Cisco WebEx, Microsoft Live Meeting, Citrix GoToMeeting or any of the other service offerings. I would like to answer that now.

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I just finished reading the book “Inspired – How to create products customers love” by Marty Cagan and I must say that it definitely deserves high marks.  This guy has some great insight into driving successful products with a sharp focus on the product manager role.  Going into 2010, I plan to really use the lessons learned in this book to recalibrate  on many levels.

In version 6.5 of the IVE software we released Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) support.  While it was great to capture the early lead in terms of features and functionality, let’s not forget that the solutions must also scale.  And let’s face it, the VDI space is so new that no one really knows how well remote access gateways will stand up when they are needed the most.  Would you believe me if I told you that a single SA6500 can scale to 10K concurrent users?  Well, you shouldn’t.  After all, that’s like going to the tire store, seeing a set of tires that is rated for 60K miles and then assuming that every customer that buys them will get 60K miles of use.  And I can assure you, the tires that I bought for my cars when I was 18 never came close to reaching their marketing numbers…even though I’m sure they did for many.

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My friends over at MultiFactor have really done a nice job with their SecureAuth implementation for the Juniper SSL VPN.  I encourage anyone reading this to check out this case study, especially if you are in healthcare: http://www.multifa.com/multifactor-authentication-news/cs-detail.aspx?ID=6.  Having worked in this vertical myself for many years, I knew that the first vendor to deliver a solid solution that would allow physicians to ditch their key fobs while still meeting the HIPAA requirements for strong authentication would be an instant success across the healthcare vertical.

I actually flew out to meet with CHS well over a year ago to see what they were looking to achieve, as I had been actively working with 2 top security products that were trying to build a similar solution for them.  Clearly, MultiFactor provided an innovative solution in minimal time and stole the show.  Well done!

What I’m sure customers will appreciate the most is that both SAML and X.509 certificates are utilized to ensure that customers do not have to create (and support) custom sign-in pages.  As they boast on their partner portal ” The SecureAuth client makes X.509 installation and authentication simple, your grandma can do it”