The SSL portion of the remote access market is still small, but analysts expect that it will grow quickly over the next several years. By 2006, Meta Group predicts, 80 percent of companies will use SSL as one of their means of access. Early adopters of SSL?many in the health-care industry?have found that it has a place in their organization even if that doesn’t mean they will do away with their traditional VPN for staffers who need the full access.

At Catholic Health System, IT employees became interested in VPN technology early on. In one of their first experiments, they built a traditional VPN so that a group of eight radiologists could review images on their home PC. Initially, they distributed software to the physicians to download on their PC but found that most of them had their own networks and configurations that complicated the process. The doctors wanted IT staff to come to their home to do the reconfiguring, but that created a support bottleneck. "Our physicians didn’t really like this, and these are smart people," says Torre. "We are still using this system, but it isn’t a model that we wanted to proliferate because of the expense and lower satisfaction."

When Torre wanted to start a project that would provide remote access to 500 doctors, he started looking for an alternative. He chose Neoteris for its ease of use and its appropriateness for the health-care industry. Doctors now log in to the Neoteris box from a Web browser, using their user name, PIN and an additional code number generated by an RSA SecurID. The fact that Neoteris doesn’t allow access to every application is an advantage, Torre says, given that the hospital network wants to provide access only to certain information such as patient test results.

Just as doctors are gaining access with greater convenience, lawyers at Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal in Chicago are now able to get into their network from their Web browser anywhere in the world. Sonnenschein, which had installed Citrix software to centralize applications, initially set up a traditional VPN for its globe-trotting lawyers and those that like to log on at home. While the system worked well for the company laptops, IT staffers ran into more problems with lawyers working at home who lacked a firewall at their residence. With Citrix Secure Gateway, another SSL appliance, the lawyers can now gain access via Web browser. According to Sonnenschein’s CIO, Andrew Jurczyk, the SSL system costs about half of what the VPN did. The one drawback, he says, is that lawyers occasionally can’t get past firewalls when visiting some large corporate clients.