Ok, I have been somewhat slack with updates and for good reason. IT Partners has been incredibly busy, a good sign that the Waikato economy is growing again. We are seeing higher levels of recruitment, adding to net staff numbers along with increased levels of investment especially in R & D and strategic projects. IT Partners continues to grow with two new hires joining us over the next 3 months, so we will soon be a team of 14.
At IT Partners we love it when we can better implement technology and achieve savings at the same time. A recent example has been the announcement by Citrix to deploy a number of their hardware based products as virtual instances. We have long been an advocate of Citrix Access Gateway (CAG) which is in my opinion the best SSL VPN product out there. The CAG is fast, efficient and able to be easily deployed and operated by non-technical people. The downside, and a limiter of our sales previously, was an entry level price of $5000 + GST. Now that it is available as a virtual appliance the cost has come down to about $1800 + GST.
For some clarification, from what we’ve seen, most remote access in NZ is either done in some insecure fashion (Windows Servers directly exposed to the net), or using manual connections setup using PPTP which is slower and more prone to interruptions in transmission. PPTP has been favoured as a VPN protocol as it is built in to Windows Server, and is thus “free”. However, no account is taken of the time to manually configure and troubleshoot these connections over the lifetime of use. What we know from our clients that have transitioned to SSL VPNs is that they have less support calls, faster connections and are able to self-provision.