NetMotion – Making Remote Users Mobile

NetMotion Wireless is a US based company formed in 2001. Their primary product known as Mobility XE is a Mobile Virtual Private Network (Mobile VPN) targeted at mobile workers in the enterprise, public safety, government, health care and utility industries.

Mobility XE is a software only product that aims to provide secure, continuous remote access to network resources from mobile devices over wired or wireless IP-based networks. This type of service is offered by many other vendors, however Mobility XE has a unique selling point called "Application Persistence".

Traditional IPSec and SSL VPN’s do not tend to handle wireless or roaming access very well. This means that if you are connected via a wireless hotspot or 3G, your connection strength will vary depending on location and surroundings. This will often result in a temporary loss of connectivity. Unfortunately, when this happens, network driven services such as e-mail, calendaring, Intranet access and file transfers will lose their connection and display an error message to the user or simply become unresponsive. This is especially frustrating if a user is authenticated against a secure application or half way through completing a file transfer as they will be forced to re-authenticate or re-start the transfer process from the beginning.

"Application Persistence" offered by Mobility XE is able to sustain an applications session through a loss of connectivity and even through a change of connection type, such as 3G to a wireless hotspot. This means that any application or process the user was previously using will be automatically suspended with no irritating error messages being displayed. When the connection returns, the suspended applications will automatically continue from where they left off, without requiring the user to re-authenticate. This process works for almost all applications and requires no additional configuration work to be completed, even connection orientated applications such as FTP and Telnet will suspend without an issue. Not only is "application persistence" useful during a loss of connectivity, but it also enables true roaming capabilities. This means the user is able to connect to a wireless hotspot, move outside and maintain a connection during the switch to 3G, and then connect via a wired network at home without ever losing their session to the enterprise network.

Mobility XE also has advance access control features, centralized management and reporting. To learn more about the product please visit: www.netmotionwireless.com.

How it works:

The Mobility XE client is a customizable, lightweight application that sits on the user’s computer. Unfortunately at this time the application only supports Windows, therefore Mac and Linux users will have to look elsewhere for their remote access solution. The client automatically handles the available network interface cards installed on the user’s computer (including 3G), as well as the IP addressing, security policies, access control and application optimisation. Once installed it should require no user input or configuration and handles connection termination and application persistence automatically.

The Mobility XE client terminates against the Mobility XE server, this is a piece of software that runs on a Windows server platform which sets up and maintains user sessions. NetMotion dictate that one server (depending on specification) is able to terminate up to 1500 concurrent user sessions. If more sessions are required then the software supports clustering whereby multiple servers run together to provide additional capacity.

The diagram below shows the remote user changing connection type whilst maintaining their session to the enterprise network which is being handled by the Mobility XE server.