The Semi-Finalists: ESSAR Group's SSL VPN Project

While on the move, SSL VPN is a solution that provides consistent connectivity to corporate network without the need for any special software installation while maintaining adequate security

With the Essar group going global, there was more travel involved for the company's offers. As they travelled, the officers needed to exchange files through email, access corporate apps from their laptops, mobile devices, tablets, and even public kiosks. What was needed therefore was a seamless way for people to connect to the corporate network. Earlier, the group was using IPSec client based VPNs for access, which had severe limitations. These included problems with mis-configuration, corruption, and application/OS compatibility issuses. Plus, there were frequent connectivity issues because of port blocking on remote networks. The IPSec solution also suffered from frequent disconnections due to high-latency. Plus, there were no built-in compression techniques. Other problems included lack of granular control like application control on IPSec VPN for specific users. Essar had difficulty in providing remote access to non-Essar employees.

Overall, IPSec client failed to deliver a consistent and reliable connectivity to employees on the move.

About the SSL VPN Deployment

ESSAR switched to Juniper's SA 6500 series SSL VPN to overcome the issues faced by IPSec. It provided safe and secure transmission of data. Moreover, since it's client-less, it reduces management and support calls. As a result, they work on more places, including home PCs, smartphones, kiosks, PDAs and even unmanaged devices over both wireless and wired networks. The solution provides granular reporting, like the apps or resources that were accessed during a particular session, trend analysis, and the bandwidth used by each connecting client. It also allows for quick publishing of applications, without the need to open additional ports on the firewall, or to register public IPs. As a result, it saves on public IP and domain registrations, because different resources can be accessed from the Internet using a single URL after successful authentication.

THE RESULT

SSL VPN resulted in providing secured unified communication and access platform, thereby supporting the Virtualization and BYOD drive of Essar Group. There was no need for any special software installation. It can be used from smartphones, tablets etc. The solution resulted in a lot of cost saving for the company. This included simple and low cost things like savings in domain registration cost of `600 per domain annually, saving on public IP cost of `3,000 per IP annually. It also included more complex savings like reduction in helpdesk support hours calls to 100 calls per month, reduction in average duration of SSL VPN support calls from 20 mins to 15 mins. It saved License cost on Citrix presentation server: `2,400 per user license annually compared to `750 perpetual SSL client license.

The overall RoI from deploying the SSL VPN for the group has been `8 Lakhs per month.