Pulse Secure, the leading provider of Secure Access solutions, today announced that EMA, an analyst firm specializing in IT and data management technologies, has honored Pulse Secure as the industry's leading hybrid IT secure access platform vendor. Pulse Secure was selected by EMA as a "Top Three" vendor in three related product categories and was the only vendor, among more than 60 assessed, to achieve the highest ratings across these Hybrid IT categories.

Driven by digital business transformation, the world of securing access to enterprise applications, data and other IT services continues to evolve at a rapid pace. Emerging requirements for workforce mobility, distributed data center, virtual and cloud-based IT environments, and data protection have yielded significant access control complexities. 

EMA conducted research to identify the access security issues facing organizations today, including a survey of leaders from over 200 enterprises and an analysis of hundreds of vendor product briefings, case studies and demonstrations. The published report identified ten priorities for enabling secure access to enterprise IT services and offers insight into key challenges, considerations and technologies. The report also supports IT decision makers' vendor-selection process as it heralds 30 of the most innovative vendor solutions addressing the greatest array of requirements for secure access enablement, highlighting Pulse Secure's leadership ranking across three categories:

• Unifying access control across hybrid IT ecosystems
• Enabling secure remote access to business networks
• Network Access Control with IoT enablement
  

Download the abridged version of the "2018 EMA Top 3 Report and Decision Guide for Enabling Secure Access to Enterprise IT Services."

"Increased pressure to enable workforce mobility and scale IT services across a variety of data center, public and private cloud environments have challenged organizations to grant secure and reliable access," said Steve Brasen, research director at Enterprise Management Associates. "Based on the breadth, depth and interoperability of its solutions, Pulse Secure is distinguished in the market as providing the most comprehensive, integrated and flexible Hybrid IT Secure Access platform."

"EMA's recognition of Pulse Secure as an industry-leading secure access vendor is testament to our focus on customer needs and our drive to ensure superior user experience while delivering simple, highly manageable and integrated solutions," said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, CEO at Pulse Secure. "Our Secure Access portfolio enables organizations to improve productivity by addressing a wide variety of business, visibility and compliance requirements as they evolve from data center to hybrid IT environments."

Report Findings

Pulse Secure offers a portfolio of software-driven Secure Access solutions that satisfy usability, contextual intelligence and orchestration to support hybrid IT environments. The EMA comparative vendor research resulted in three Pulse Secure products being awarded as top solutions: Pulse Cloud Secure, Pulse Connect Secure and Pulse Policy Secure.    

In the "Unifying access control across hybrid IT ecosystems" category, key considerations for solution adoption included: console interface breadth of support, endpoint identity management capabilities, hybrid hosting environment support, connectivity governance and IT service integrations. The report highlights Pulse Secure's hybrid IT access management solution, Pulse Cloud Secure, as offering:

• Access to on-premises and public cloud-hosted services enabled through Pulse Connect Secure
• Broad SSO and MFA support with stringent host checking of endpoints
• Visibility and policy-enforcement for security compliance by validating endpoints and verifying levels of access before connections
• Integration directly with leading identity providers, including Ping Identity, Okta and Microsoft ADFS
  

In the "Enabling secure remote access to business networks" category, key considerations for solution adoption included: persistence of secure network connections, context awareness, breadth of supported endpoints, onboarding process and third-party integrations. The report highlights Pulse Secure's data center and cloud VPN platform, Pulse Connect Secure, as offering:

• Secure VPN connections may be optionally set as always-on (routing all network traffic), on demand (only when needed) or only when utilizing specific applications
• The Pulse One management platform can be used to automate appliance software updates and policy changes while viewing a dashboard of appliance status
• Unified client that supports a variety of endpoint types, including Windows, macOS, Linux (CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, Ubuntu), iOS, Android and Chrome OS
• When a user transitions from a remote location to an on-premises location, connectivity is dynamically switched without any interruption to the existing network connections
• Application certifications that include: Common Criteria (NDcPP), FIPS and JITC UC APL
  

In the "Network Access Control with IoT enablement" category, key consideration for solution adoption included: scalability, IoT device authentication, contextually-aware policy controls, inclusion of a RADIUS server, dashboarding, reporting and alerting, and third-party integrations.  The report highlights Pulse Secure's NAC solution, Pulse Policy Secure, as offering:

• Profiles network devices with real-time detection, classification and monitoring of managed, unmanaged and IoT devices to deliver an intuitive user experience via a unified client for both NAC and remote VPN access to the data center and cloud
• Contextual information for endpoint visibility and policy enforcement are referenced from a wide variety of network protocols, data collection tools and multivendor integrations
• Automates onboarding, sponsored-based guest and device management, and BYOD enablement
• Integrates with next-generation firewalls for identity-based admission control and sends user identity information to other 3rd party solutions via API, Syslog and the IF-MAP protocol
• Built-in, high-performance RADIUS server eliminates proxy latency while simplifying network planning and reducing TCO
• Centrally managed from the cloud or on-premises with the Pulse One administration console and includes dashboards that provide a high-level snapshot of all managed, unmanaged and IoT devices as well as granular reports delivering inventory, access, security and compliance details
• Designed for scale, Pulse Policy Secure can support up to 20 million endpoints
  

For additional insight, download the abridged version of the "2018 EMA Top 3 Report and Decision Guide for Enabling Secure Access to Enterprise IT Services" by Enterprise Management Associates. Enterprises and resellers are invited to visit Pulse Secure to evaluate Hybrid IT Secure Access solutions for free.