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.

A recent New York Times article, “Killing the Computer to Save It,” profiles one of the United States’ leading computer security specialists, Dr. Peter G. Neumann.

Back in the fall of 1952, Neumann sat down to breakfast with the one and only Albert Einstein. What they discussed led Neumann to embrace a design philosophy based on Einstein’s aphorism, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Today, computer systems are so vulnerable to attacks because of their complexity. According to Neumann, complex systems break in complex ways. This has led to an epidemic of computer malware, scores of data breaches and thefts, and growing concern about cyber warfare—so much so that Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned earlier this month of a possible “cyber-Pearl Harbor” attack on the United States.

Neumann believes the only way to ensure that systems are secure and trustworthy is to start over and redesign them from a clean slate. His current project, fittingly titled Clean Slate, is funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and isn’t necessarily about starting from scratch. Rather, it’s an effort to rethink computer design by studying the past half century’s worth of research, carefully selecting the best ideas, and building a new and complete solution from the bottom up. And one that’s simpler, more stable, and puts security first.

In the article, Neumann provides an interesting scientific analogy. He notes that biological systems have multiple immune systems. Not only are there the initial barriers, but the body has secondary systems (e.g., T cells) that detect and eliminate intruders as well as remember them in order to provide future protections. We need systems like that—not that the ones we have today, which were designed with security as an afterthought.