GRIC Communications of Milpitas, CA, which last week announced a flat-rate “business class” Wi-Fi service bundle, jumped to what they call the second layer of their strategy, offering a complete security package — what one spokesperson calls “GRIC’s strategy for beating iPass and Boingo in the enterprise.”
The package, coming in May of this year, includes a managed virtual private network for corporate users of the GRIC MobileOffice service.
“Most large Fortune 500 companies have their own VPN servers,” says Bharat Dave, president and CEO of GRIC. “For those who don’t want a set infrastructure and the hassle of managing it, we’ve taken a proven technology and integrated it with our offering.”
The service will include a VPN concentrator and the client software, with centralized management, monitoring, and provisioning. MobileOffice also includes personal firewall software and intrusion detection technology, plus GRIC’s Remote End Point Security (REPS) for pushing out policy changes to groups of clients from the hosted central management console.
The new MobileOffice services are not limited to the GRIC Broadband Wi-Fi users — anyone using the Internet to get on their corporate network can utilize it.
The GRIC VPN solutions comes from Blue Ridge Networks of Chantilly, VA, which provides services to the federal government.
“Those with VPN already don’t need this [service],” says Dave, but he feels that those in the process of looking for VPN service or changing ownership should consider it. Using MobileOffice, the VPN tunnel to the service is automatically generated, and even specific applications that use the tunnel will be opened.
