Whale Competitive Differentiation - Active Directory®
This thumbnail value story highlights a key capability Whale Communications believes significantly differentiates its SSL VPN gateway from other vendors' products.
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Whale's SSL VPN products use native Microsoft Active Directory integration tools that ensure 100% compatibility not only with the LDAP standard but also with specific Microsoft directory services implementation. |
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Whale's SSL VPN integrates natively with the Active Directory domain, extending this domain to remote users.
Microsoft Active Directory is a central component in many organizational networks for managing the identities, distributed resources and access control policies that make up network environments. Therefore it is unsurprising that all SSL VPN gateway vendors claim their products integrate easily with Active Directory.
However, in reality, many Active Directory implementations are not straightforward and the associated complexities create problems for SSL VPN gateway implementations. For example, administrators expect a simple configuration of Active Directory without being expected to understand lower-level protocols such as LDAP. In fact, during the course of an implementation, many SSL VPN gateway administrators have had to ferret out LDAP syntax and enter it manually. Further, SSL VPN gateways should allow access to Active Directory both with LDAP and NTLM protocols. Failure to support NTLM, as is found with some SSL VPN gateways, will inhibit the usage in a Windows NT environment.
Customer illustration: One of Whale's government customers has a strict security policy that allows only users and computers that belong to a specific Domain to query Active Directory. This customer tested various SSL VPN gateways, and Whale's appliance was the only one that managed to join the domain without violating the governmental security policy.
Whale's SSL VPN products use native Microsoft Active Directory integration tools that ensure 100% compatibility not only with LDAP standard but also with specific Microsoft directory services implementation. Whale is committed to keeping pace with Microsoft updates. On release of new versions or updates by Microsoft, Whale's SSL VPN Active Directory implementation is immediately up-to-date, preventing the time lag found with other vendors whose offering is not based on native Microsoft tools.
Whale's SSL VPN enables a highly granular access control policy and supports authorization by Active Directory group membership and user attributes in addition to many other user and endpoint parameters. Using native Microsoft Active Directory tools allows Whale to implement authorization by attributes that cannot be accessed using standard LDAP, such as querying Global Catalog or authorizing access based on membership in Primary Group or Universal Group. Whale has extensive experience with Active Directory and proven real-life implementations with hundreds of customers using our SSL VPN with Microsoft Active Directory.
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To learn more about how the Whale Intelligent Application Gateway appliance can work in your Active Directory environment, contact Whale at info@whale-com.com |