Pulse Secure fortifies enterprise security posture

“With growing attacks, BYOD and data privacy issues, enterprises must get a handle on users, endpoints and IoT devices accessing their network resources,” said Tony Massimini, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “Pulse Secure is distinguished by offering the benefits of both pure-play and infrastructure NAC providers. Unlike infrastructure NAC, Pulse Secure is integrated and works with popular switches, wireless, and security infrastructure to facilitate deployment and threat response. Unlike pure-play NAC offerings, Pulse Secure offers VPN and NAC solutions that amalgamate mobile, cloud and network oversight. The combination delivers enterprise value for user, endpoint and IoT visibility, as well as threat response.” 

Pulse Policy Secure (PPS) is an enterprise-class NAC solution that delivers network visibility, “comply to connect” policy enforcement and security orchestration with popular switch, wireless controller, NGFW, SIEM, EMM and endpoint security solutions. PPS tackles the challenges of securing corporate networks, which are being redefined by Hybrid IT, mobile devices and IoT. Frost & Sullivan predicts that IoT connections will reach 45.4 billion by 2023. *  IoT brings new exposures as mobile, wearables, medical and other IP-enabled devices are introduced to the corporate network.

Policy Secure 9.0 boosts compliance enforcement with broader endpoint discovery mechanisms, vulnerability assessment to prevent malware attacks such as WannaCry, as well as OS and patch management verification to safeguard Windows and macOS devices. Beyond supporting TACACS+ for role-based network device support, the release also streamlines user experience by incorporating host checking caching, directory, authentication and firewall integration techniques to reduce login prompts, authorization and device compliance time.

Pulse Profiler, sold separately or integrated within PPS, automatically identifies managed and unmanaged devices (e.g. printers, VOIP phones, cameras) that are connecting to the corporate network. The system dynamically monitors for device profile and security state changes. The new version further extends IoT device discovery, classification and management features with added means to ascertain new and custom IoT devices, and to apply policy for conditional access.

Policy Secure 9.0 further enables threat response orchestration. PPS can share identity and endpoint information with popular network and security infrastructure, as well as receive network policy enforcement requests from external solutions. The release extends integration with Palo Alto Networks, Checkpoint, Juniper and Fortinet firewalls to enrich their operational context, as well as to allow the firewall to invoke NAC endpoint network segregation or blocking. 

"Organizations understand NAC advantages for visibility, IoT security and threat mitigation, but perceive the technology to be cumbersome. The latest release of Pulse Secure NAC continues to advance our deployment, usability and integration capabilities while delivering enterprise-class functionality,” said Scott Gordon, chief marketing officer at Pulse Secure. “With our unique means to offer a simple, unified NAC and VPN solution, we allow enterprises to gain essential intelligence, compliance and protection for remote, cloud and data center access.”

Pulse Secure offers organizations an easy, flexible and scalable path to next generation NAC:

·         Start with the Pulse Profiler for dynamic endpoint and IoT device visibility, assessment, inventory and monitoring

·         Deploy Pulse Policy Secure for automated guest management, mobile on-boarding, endpoint remediation, network enforcement and threat response

·         Streamline implementation with wizard templates and the means to phase in access enforcement, network coverage, and core integrations

·         Scale cost-effectively with the PPS appliance, which includes a high-performance RADIUS server supporting up to 50,000 concurrent devices

·         Centrally manage appliances and over a million endpoints though the Pulse One console

·         Simplify and expedite NAC deployment for Pulse Secure VPN customers by leveraging the same user client, policy framework and centralized management console

"We are seeing more IoT deployments especially within our larger clients in healthcare and manufacturing and we welcome the enhancements to Pulse Policy Secure that help to discover and protect a wider array of devices,” said David Hood, MD of ANSecurity, “The evolution of Network Access Control solutions is critical to the security industry and deeper support for next generation firewalls and other security platforms offered by the new 9.0 release will go a long way towards helping organisations to simplify security in what is an increasingly complex infrastructure landscape.”