*This post originally appeared on the Pulse Secure blog prior to the acquisition in December 2020, when Pulse Secure became part of Ivanti.

Today’s requirements of workforce mobility, Hybrid-IT, data protection, and IoT/IIoT demands end-to-end Secure Access. In a cloud computing environment, enterprises need visibility into what cloud services are being used, who is using them, and what data is shared within the cloud environment. Administrators need to control access to applications to avoid any future threats and detect unsanctioned applications as a part of Shadow IT problems. In IoT/IIoT environments, it’s critical for administrators to provide dynamic secure access to IoT/IIoT devices so that contractors can maintain and troubleshoot these devices and improve operational efficiency.

These challenges can be resolved by our newly announced release of Pulse Connect Secure (PCS) and Pulse Policy Secure (PPS) version 9.0R2. This release enables our customers to secure and manage cloud applications in their environment and improve operation efficiency with secure access for IoT/IIoT. Below are key highlights of the new release.

Cloud Application Visibility (CAV) 

The Cloud Application Visibility feature enables administrators to secure and manage cloud applications. It also provides visibility of the cloud applications used by the user and allows the administrator to set granular access and use policies to monitor the Cloud Application usage in real time. Using CAV, administrators can gain visibility into sanctioned as well as unsanctioned app usage. This feature provides real-time visibility to cloud applications usage along with their category, so that administrators can determine if certain apps need to be blocked. CAV offers application visibility regardless of location that is both on-premise using PPS and remote access using PCS. CAV is a controlled feature with Windows Pulse Client support.

Secure Access for IoT/IIoT

In IoT/IIoT environments, the challenge for administrators is to manually configure secure access policies for many IoT devices (e.g. PLCs, medical devices, etc.) adding up to operational cost. PPS enables secure access to IoT/IIoT devices through PPS/Profiler and Juniper SRX firewall integration. It allows the admin to configure an IoT access policy so that only authorized users can access the IoT devices. It also enables dynamic access control for the newly discovered IoT/IIoT devices.

Secure Access Control

Session Federation for PCS sessions to Checkpoint Firewall

When it comes to better user experience and security, admins prefer a Single Sign-on experience for their users to access protected resources without compromising security. Pulse Policy Secure (PPS) integrates with Checkpoint Firewall to provision user’s identity information (user name, roles and IP address) to the Checkpoint firewall using API. With the new 9.0R2 release, it is possible to provision Pulse Connect Secure (PCS) user’s identity information to Checkpoint firewall using IF-Map so that access control can be provided for PCS users accessing resources protected by the firewall.