Microsoft buys Whale Communications

by Bharat Suneja

Microsoft’s buying Whale Communications – maker of SSL VPN appliances. Having used Whale in a secure Outlook Web Access deployment, I have high regard for their technology. It locks down OWA pretty tightly, without ever touching your Exchange server.

I’ve frequently recommended their appliances – which allowed integration of RSA SecurID authentication for OWA access, and wondered whether/when these would allow secure RPC over HTTP(S) access, since Outlook itself does not natively support any integration with SecurID authentication.

It is quite likely the Whale technology may be integrated into ISA Server.

What would really impress many enterprise users is Outlook (RPC over HTTPS), OWA, and ActiveSync working with two-factor authentication mechanisms like SecurID and smartcards, natively, out of the box.

Nevertheless, Microsoft has done it again – bought another best-of-breed technology.

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