After the Storm: Helpful Tips for Juniper SSL VPN Customers Affected by Hurricane Sandy

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Hurricane Sandy brought incredible destruction to the U.S. East Coast, resulting in more than 100 deaths and untold damage to property. Hundreds of thousands are still without power, and long gas lines have become the norm. Rebuilding could take a long time.

For many in the affected areas, getting back to normal work may be far down on the list of priorities. But Juniper customers who are trying to restore continuity of business operations can look to Juniper SSL VPN products to help securely connect workers remotely to critical business applications and resources, allowing business to continue.

A number of our East Coast customers have installed ‘In Case of Emergency’ (ICE) licenses, which can boost the capacity of an SSL VPN device by either 25% of the licensed capacity, or to the full capacity of a given MAG Series or SA Series SSL VPN appliance. This added capacity is helping them accommodate more workers who are operating from home or other remote locations post-storm. If you need assistance in enabling your ICE licenses, contact Juniper Customer Care at 1-888-314-5822 or via the Case Manager on our support website.

If your business operations have been disrupted by this disaster, there are a number of ways that your Juniper SSL VPN products can help you get back up and running:

1. Enable Mobile VPN: Employees that are unable to get to the office can quickly download Junos Pulse onto their smartphone or mobile tablet, allowing them to access your corporate network and resources via SSL VPN. The Junos Pulse client app is available at no charge on all major mobile application stores (e.g. Google Play , Apple App Store ). It’s completely self-service, and requires only simple instructions from your IT department to configure.
2. Connect to an alternate location: If your operations are geographically dispersed, and your data center in the affected region is inoperable, you can provide your workers with simple instructions to reconfigure their Junos Pulse mobile or non-mobile client to connect to a MAG or SA Series appliance in an alternate location.
3. Add additional temporary SSL VPN capacity: Finally, if you need capacity for more users on your MAG Series or SA Series SSL VPN appliance to handle an unexpected increase in the number of employees working remotely, please contact us via Customer Care. For a limited time, we’re providing our customers a limited number of temporary licenses that can help them expand remote access to additional employees and partner workers.

Juniper cares. And we’re committed to assisting our customers as they begin to rebuild after Hurricane Sandy.

Our thoughts are with all of those affected by the storm as they begin the long struggle to recover. The Juniper Foundation has made a donation to the Red Cross relief efforts, and we’re also matching donations from our employees. We encourage our customers and partners to donate generously as well.