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“The Adventures of Antti Pilvinen” - A story by the RoarinPenguin

DISCLAIMER: All facts, people and companies in this story are fictional and do not have links with any real situation with the exception of Robert’s Coffee, Sonera and Finavia.

Helsinki – February – 8.30 AM – Vantaa airport

Antti Pilvinen, a typical Finnish salesman, has just finished his espresso at Robert’s Coffee… the aroma of his croissant is still pervading the warm environment…

What a beautiful feeling, especially when the car he left in the parking lot 20 minutes earlier is still freezing at -23 C.

Sitting in a comfortable chair, he realizes that there is still 45 minutes before the green flashing Portille sign will appear on the screen at the gate.

Thinking about how fantastic this morning is for business, he remembers that he has to finish an offer for 10 SSL VPN application portals for his potential client Sanomat. Then, it occurs to him that it could be a great moment to check email and also update Salesforce.com with a couple of notes about the two meetings he attended yesterday.

He is particularly thinking of the very promising second meeting which involves a potentially immense number of IPS engines, after the Stuxnet threat variation appeared in the wild a few days before. He needs to react quickly and prompt the Sales Engineer to send more info to Mr. Virtanen.

While waiting for his Dell to boot up, he was silently giving thanks to Finavia for sponsoring free WiFi connectivity at the airport. Sonera’s network is good but not free.

Two minutes later, he’s cheered by the logo of APSF (Antti Pilvinen Securing Finland) Oy, a nice puffy cloud on the SSL VPN portal.

Once again, he thought to what a worthwhile investment that StoneGate SSL VPN technology has been! Even on an insecure WiFi connection, from anywhere, it allowed him to safely access applications he needed. No fear about theft of identity or credentials, since  the combination of certificate-based authentication and the one time password sent to his Nokia E72 makes authentication secure and valid only for that session.

The comfortable set of icons appeared to him after the system silently but efficiently checked his security posture, and 25 minutes later he was boarding Finnair flight AY796 to Milan Malpensa to enjoy the Sales Meeting in Lago di Como organized by the Country Manager of the Italian subsidiary, Emilio.

His sales mind, so committed to results, so keen on convincing every customer to invest in security solutions… never gave a single second’s thought to the backend complexity of accessing three different systems (Outlook Web Mail, Word in Remote Desktop and CRM hosted in the cloud by Salesforce.com), each one with different credentials, simply by…

…clicking an icon.

Secure access to applications in the cloud. Simplified!

written by RoarinPenguin - 898 views \\ tags: secured access to the cloud, sslvpn, story, The Adventures of Antti Pilvinen

One of our new customers was eager to switch all of their competitor’s firewalls in their network to StoneGate firewalls. I arrived onsite midday the day before the scheduled cutover and was planning to go through the normal routine of interviewing the staff and so I could make sure to avoid any pitfalls and make sure the cutover was as smooth as possible. However, the customer had other plans for me. After two days of rebooting the  firewalls four to five times a day, they asked if I could have the StoneGate firewalls ready by 7:30 pm that night. Keep in mind I didn’t arrive until 1 pm. Well long story short I said “sure no problem” with a muted smile. I got the firewalls configured and was ready to make the swap when the customer suggested taking a quick break for dinner before we made the cut. When we came back we found the  firewalls down again and thought we might as well leave them down. We powered on the new StoneGate cluster, made initial contact, pushed the policies and had life breathing back into the network. The StoneGate solution made us look like champs. Thank you Stonesoft! We would not have been able to do this with any other system as fast and as easy. The StoneGate Management Center interface is like none other and far exceeds ASDM and other similar interfaces. You gave me the power and the training to hit this curveball out of the park!

written by RayMaurer - 1,813 views \\ tags: Cutover, firewall, Partner, story

I was talking with a potential customer in the past days about the plusses (differentiators) of StoneGate SSL VPN technology versus other competitors.

Soon I realized that, beside the common wish of having a good clientless mobile to site encrypted communication channel, there is high interest in two “shining” features of StoneGate SSL VPN: the Application Portal logic and, above all, the various authentication methods (over 15) included and supported.

And about authentication, we had a nice discussion about how the beauty of hardware based OTP tokens turns rapidly into a nightmare for system administrators, because such devices are maybe the “most forgotten on the shelf at home ”

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written by RoarinPenguin - 2,994 views \\ tags: application portal, authentication, MobileID, SSL VPN, story