Keysight Technologies has extended the company’s Innovate Anywhere program in response to COVID-19, which is available through May 31, 2020, to enable IT staff to support the growing remote user community, while maintaining network availability, improving security and ensuring performance.

“As companies around the world adjust to more and more employees working remotely, IT teams have stepped up to support those remote users to ensure business continuity,” stated Mark Pierpoint, President of Network Applications & Security at Keysight Technologies. “Virtual private networks (VPNs) are critical to maintain security between users working from home and their company. Keysight is committed to helping IT groups ensure their VPNs are performing properly for all the users, while not costing more than necessary by being over-provisioned.”

■ Complimentary Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Virtual Private Network (VPN) Check: Many VPNs use the SSL protocol to provide secure private network access from a public network. Keysight’s complimentary SSL VPN Availability Assessment is a self-service web portal that enables IT staff to check their company’s Cisco VPN gateway’s availability to accept new incoming connections. This low-impact assessment includes daily e-mail reports and proactive alerts to potential VPN gateway availability issues.

■ SSL VPN Gateway Assessment Service: A VPN infrastructure is key to business continuity, but companies scaled most of their deployments for the status quo — not the new normal. Now, business continuity depends on employees being able to work remotely. Not only does IT need to provision enough VPN capacity for a usage surge, they need to validate that the network can smoothly support critical applications at peak traffic loads.

Keysight’s test experts use an elastically scaling cloud infrastructure to simulate thousands of VPN clients connecting to the customer’s production VPN gateways during a maintenance window. The assessment provides detailed reports and metrics that enable IT to identify performance issues and optimize split tunnel policies for a better user experience by answering these critical questions:

- How many users can my VPN gateway support?
- How long does connection establishment take when a lot of users are connecting?
- How much throughput does the gateway support with lots of connected users?
- How much bandwidth per tunnel can my infrastructure sustain?

■ Complimentary Live Network Testing Trial: To support customers whose unified communications, voice and video applications are struggling to keep up with an influx of remote connections, Keysight is offering a complimentary 30-day Hawkeye Network Performance Monitoring trial to help minimize service disruptions and ensure user experience with active network monitoring.

■ Complimentary Breach and Attack Simulation Trial: Security operations teams supporting a growing remote workforce must assess how security protocols are working via the company’s VPN, given the numerous threats posed by exploitable home devices and exposure to malware. Keysight’s Threat Simulator, a breach and attack simulation platform, safely measures security risks and exposes gaps.