San Francisco-based Juniper Networks developed Secure Access SSL VPN originally. The product is now offered as Ivanti Connect Secure, first by Pulse Secure (spun off in 2014), and now by Ivanti since their acquisition of Pulse Secure in December, 2020.
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NetScaler ADC
Score 8.1 out of 10
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NetScaler ADC is an application delivery controller.
Pulse SDP is well suited in an environment where the majority of employees are working remotely or have extensive business travel. In today's environment where cybersecurity is of the utmost importance for all organizations, Pulse SDP provides a solid level of security for those remote employees or those traveling.
Citrix Netscaler can be a powerful network appliance for environments that are fully committed and open to utilizing a network appliance that isn't made by a traditional network vendor. Administrator user experience has improved over the years and will continue to improve with the flexibility of virtual and physical appliances available for medium and large enterprises.
Flexibility. NetScaler assumes its admins know a bit about networking and in-depth details surrounding the applications they are configuring access for/to. This being so, the range of configuration options is very broad allowing various versions' combinations of protocol patterns, expressions, rules etc., all to the benefit of the admin.
Granularity. Having such a broad range of configuration options available, while still allowing simple options to be configured simply. The GUI is well-stylized and navigation has a good flow.
Ease of control. For load-balancing of simple services right out of the box, NetScaler makes it pretty easy, compared to the range of options available in the surrounding GUI and under the hood.
The option to connect before logging in using Network Connect is EOL, and the alternative is not good enough currently (requires machine authentication).
The documentation could use an overhaul with specific examples related to the command line as well as GUI. Explanations in the documentation would also be helpful.
Being able to have more than just one routing table would allow the ability to leverage security.
Improve on the specifics I mentioned previously and could be a 10/10 product. It is also a confusingly branded product that I have supported in two large enterprises where IT departments are unsure if the product belongs to the Citrix remote access support team or the Network infrastructure support team (it should be the later) and typically under utilized.
At Adecco, first and foremost, we have Pulse SDP easy to use for our employees. This is a critical factor for us because employees are spending much less time calling into support than engaged in high payoff activities. However, when I have called in for support, Pulse SDP has been responsive and effective.
Overall, our organization's experience with Citrix support is that support can be hit or miss. Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts and much longer than desirable to obtain a viable solution for issues experienced with their products. It would be great to see Citrix invest time, effort, and almighty dollars into improving their support and bug fix process across the board.
The F5 product was more complicated to manage and requires more time to get used to. Juniper VPN is simpler. F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager may be better if you need other side solutions like load balancing and GSLB. So, it really depends on your requirements.
We chose Citrix ADC over Kemp and F5 due to additional integrations with various products such as Citrix/Horizon/Monitoring tools. We additionally chose ADC due to better ease of use and ability to have the appliances be virtual or physical, with the configuration being a simple migration of code which provided flexibility to be able to do a hybrid environment with ease.
