Ivanti Connect Secure Reviews

Our university's central staff, faculty, and students use Pulse Connect Secure as a VPN to connect remotely to their machines. For example, they can access servers when they want to do research. We're also using Pulse Connect Secure for remote configurations.

Since the pandemic, we've been using the solution at full capacity to provide VPNs because many people work remotely from home. We use Pulse Connect Secure primarily for remote access, VPNs, tunneling, etc.

VPN tunneling is a very valuable feature of Pulse Connect Secure which I like because it connects users, gets the IP from the subnet or part of the network, and the network can be routed between different VLANs, letting users work from home.

I also like that Pulse Connect Secure is very easy to use, and you can see traffic logs on the solution.

An area for improvement in Pulse Connect Secure is the concurrent connections, particularly needing a license if you want to use Pulse Connect Secure with your Microsoft or Windows machine. My organization experiences issues with multiple users or even one user with concurrent or multiple connections.

In the next release of Pulse Connect Secure, I want it to become a converged infrastructure where you can get more features in one box. For example, you now see firewall products in the market that provide VPN, IPS, and firewall clearing or flushing features. At the moment, Pulse Connect Secure can only serve as your VPN.

As a user, I prefer a readily available virtual environment or a virtualization functionality, though I wonder if that feature's already provided.

I also want to see a PRA feature added to Pulse Connect Secure in the future, particularly a password management feature that would be useful whenever third-party users or vendors try to access Pulse Connect Secure.

I've been using Pulse Connect Secure for five years now.

Pulse Connect Secure is a very stable solution.

There's room for improvement in the scalability of Pulse Connect Secure. It's a six out of ten for me. You can scale the solution, but not always up to the level you want or need.

Pulse Connect Secure technical support is good. It's a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I used Norton before using Pulse Connect Secure, and I found that Pulse Connect Secure is better in terms of multiple integrations, which isn't available in Norton.

The initial setup for Pulse Connect Secure is straightforward. I'd rate the setup as seven out of ten.

Pulse Connect Secure is very easy to configure, and you can configure it in less time than other solutions. The total time it took to deploy the solution was two months.

Initially, we contacted the vendor, and they provided Pulse Connect Secure professional deployment service. Two people from the vendor side and four from our side were involved in deploying the solution. Then for the rest of the project, in terms of deployment, we were able to do it ourselves. Still, we used the initial vendor support as a reference when deploying Pulse Connect Secure by ourselves.

The pricing for Pulse Connect Secure is not low and not high, so it's good. It's a six out of ten for me, price-wise, and because it's a product with a specific purpose.

Currently, my organization uses PRA (Privileged Remote Access), Pulse Connect Secure for the VPN, and Palo Alto GlobalProtect.

My organization is a user, not a reseller.

Ivanti acquired Pulse Connect Secure, so I don't remember the exact version I'm on because my organization upgraded to Ivanti. Though the infrastructure works similarly, the graphics, banners, and logos changed.

I'm responsible for Pulse Connect Secure maintenance, but I have a backup person who takes charge when I'm unavailable, for example, when I'm on leave. That backup person also has his box, which I handle when he's on leave. So I'd say two people take care of the maintenance of Pulse Connect Secure.

One thousand five hundred people use Pulse Connect Secure within the university; the staff comprises eighty percent, and students comprise the remaining twenty percent. Everyone in the university has used Pulse Connect Secure since the pandemic started.

The university now has another solution that provides the same service for free, so there is no plan to increase the usage of Pulse Connect Secure.

My advice to others planning to use Pulse Connect Secure is that it's very stable and easy to manage, so you should go with this product. I also used to work with Norton, and I still like Norton as a product because it's very stable, unlike Cisco, and Norton is very easy to upgrade. It's a good system if you're looking for a VPN, but if you need multiple integrations from a VPN, then Pulse Connect Secure is a good solution versus Norton.

As I've been using the solution for over five years, from that perspective and my understanding of how to configure and support it, based on my knowledge of Pulse Connect Secure, I can rate it as eight out of ten.

We are using it as a remote access solution for our users and partners.

It is customer-friendly. It is quite easy for our users to connect. There is also the flexibility of the features.

We want to switch to another solution because there are some challenges with the support from Pulse. The quality of documentation is also not good. It is sometimes very hard to find documentation that provides a solution and describes how all this works.

I definitely miss a single pane of glass where we can have several clusters deployed across the globe. We should have the capability to manage all clusters centrally. Currently, we have to log in locally on each cluster to see what is going on there. A single pane of glass for monitoring and viewing the overall health of our solutions, services, and licenses is currently missing.

I have been working with Pulse for at least four years.

Recently, there were some issues, and we had to upgrade it quickly.

When it is on-prem, it is not so scalable. To scale the solution, you also need to deploy new machines and configure them from scratch. It is not as easy as a cloud solution where you scale automatically according to your needs. The problem for us is that it is on-prem.

We are not satisfied with their support. They usually cannot find the solution to our problems. If they manage to find a solution, it is not mature. It is mostly a workaround with some hidden scripts.

I did not participate too much in the installation, but it was quite straightforward to deploy and configure. There were no big challenges.

I would recommend it depending on the size of the organization. I would recommend it for small to medium size organizations but not for big global companies.

I would rate Pulse Connect Secure a six out of 10.

We use Pulse to access our internal network, as it is the only solution that has been approved by our cyber security team. We also have to use both VPN and Secure VPN for added security.

In order to access an internal server from another country, we must use Pulse Secure.

The user experience has room for improvement. Sometimes when we have two profiles it is not easy to use.

I have been using the solution for five years.

We previously used the open-source version which did not have the same scope so we switched to the licensed version to meet our organization's requirements.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

I would recommend the solution.

The solution is primarily used as a VPN. There's an agent that can work with Linux, Mac, or Windows and it will provide a VPN tunnel to connect to the server. That way, it's easy to access the server. Based on the rules that have been configured, users would get specific levels of access. 

The interface is so simple for the user to access. Its layout is very user-friendly. 

The new UI that they are providing right now is very good.

They have a lot of good features, and everything we need is basically covered.

It is very easy to install the solution. 

I've had a customer face some issues with connection logs and live status. They had trouble with how many users were connected. There seems to be some sort of bug related to this that I would like to be fixed. We need to know how many live active users there are and we can't. We even updated the server, however, we still can't see the proper level of live connections. Right now, it's showing as 300 users and my customer does not have that many users in his organization. 

I've been using the solution for 1.5 years. 

Overall, it is a stable product. We've had very few issues using it. I'd rate the stability eight out of ten overall. So far, this version has been quite reliable. 

Pulse, like every box, has their dependency. If you are using a 5,000 or a 3,000, you can only connect X number of users according to the size of the box. Therefore, if you buy a bigger size, you can scale easily. You do, however, need to plan accordingly.

In terms of the ability to scale, I would rate the solution seven out of ten. 

Technical support is responsible and they offer good support. Overall, they give you support in a reasonable amount of time and get you whatever you require. When you raise a case, they tackle that case. The escalation is also good. The team has knowledgeable engineers which understand the product and have experience with that product.

Positive

The installation process is very simple and straightforward. I'd rate the ease of setup 8.5 out of ten. 

If you have a basic knowledge of networking and servers, you can easily deploy a server in a virtual platform or in your on-premises device. 

I don't have any knowledge in relation to pricing. 

The product can be installed on-premises, on the cloud, or on VMware. 

If potential new users are going to use this solution, then they are using a great product. It will give you the support you need and fulfill your requirements. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We normally use the product for VPN connectivity to access applications and servers remotely. We also use it for applications like Teams and Outlook.

The product is easy to use. It is reliable. It is always available. It's quite transparent. The product is quite exhaustive for the end user. It serves the purpose. The traffic that is involved as part of the VPN is secure. The solution has increased our productivity. The updates are optimal.

The solution must be more user-friendly. It must show more connection details and statistics to the end user.

I have been using the solution for three years.

I rate the tool’s stability a ten out of ten.

We have a few thousand users in our organization. It is used daily.

The solution is easy to deploy. The deployment doesn’t take more than 15 minutes.

The product can be deployed in-house.

I will recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

The solution is being used for VPN.

The stability of the product is its most valuable feature.

The support team of the product needs improvement. Sometimes we have issues with multiple authentications, but there is no help from the support team. It is very dissatisfying.

Some emerging technologies like Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) have the VPN included even if you don't need to use it. The present process for Pulse Connect Secure is becoming old-fashioned; they need to change the product.

I have used the solution for two and a half years for my company. I have been using this solution since 2004 when it was called Juniper.

It is a stable solution.

The solution is scalable. You need to add a few more licenses, and it works fine. Currently, seven thousand or eight thousand people have current concurrent licenses.

The technical support is not satisfactory. I rate it four or five out of ten.

Neutral

I used a Cisco solution and another solution.

Pulse used to be much more flexible than Cisco. You could do more with Pulse, like different realms and authentication policies for different types of users. But the latest still needs to be improved, and users see much more user-friendly solutions. As I mentioned, other solutions exist, like Zero Trust Networks Access.

So these are getting much easier for users. But for installing a solution for the first time, ThoughtSpot was much easier than Cisco.

The initial setup was straightforward.

This product is good and easy to maintain if one can manage without the products' support team and have their administrative team. If you want to implement a new feature or interaction with the product, it gets complicated, or help is needed.

I rate the overall product a six out of ten.

The solution helps with principal decisions. It also helps with the security and configuration of many technologies.

I would like the solution to be more secure and compatible. It also needs to improve integration with other systems.

I have been working with the solution for six months.

The tool’s tech support is very good.

The solution’s implementation took four months to complete.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The product is used as a secure gateway - a gateway to give access to remote users by checking the user credentials and user authentication. It also checks the machine authentication and the machine security, by using host checking mechanisms. The product gives or allows access or authorizes access to certain resources based on the user credentials and the machine check.

They support a very extended or a list of resources, network resources, applications, whatever. They are very broad in supporting all kinds of resources.

The flexibility in their management is great. For us, there was no other product better than that.

The product is very easy to set up. 

We would like to see them be a bit more swift in the changes in the protocols and the browsers. They are lagging a bit behind. Certainly, for the Pulse Desktop Client, they should really work on the modernization.

The stability could be better. There are sometimes bugs in the system.

I've used the solution for years already. The VPN solution has been taken out of the Juniper company and has been put into a new company, Pulse Secure, so we have been using this solution, the same solution, for years on.

For many years, it was known as a very stable platform. However, now, they have a bit of difficulty really having a stable and robust product overall, end-to-end. 

The central infrastructure is still very stable and robust, however, have troubles with security vulnerabilities and bugs in its code. They have a bit of trouble on those issues, on those topics in general.

The scalability is great. You can have whatever number of appliances you need.

We are an ISP, meaning we have different customers, and different organizations, for this VPN service. We have a very diverse set of clients. We have somewhere around 10,000 end-users for this platform.

We were using a Cisco VPN solution in the years starting around 2002 or 2003. A Juniper solution was chosen back around 2007. It changed names and we have been using it ever since.

The implementation is rather easy. Installing out of the box, the application is easy to install and configure.

Deployment time depends on a few factors. For example, the primary installation, the primary configuration of the central infrastructure, only takes a couple of hours. Then, of course, to have all your different clients connected and connecting to the infrastructure, that's a project of months as you have to set up a whole project and communication strategy, and then you need a project manager to give clear guidance on this.

Pulse Secure and Juniper are very expensive in their license cost. That's a drawback of this solution. The hardware is rather cheap, however, licensing is very, very, very expensive.

You have different kinds of licenses you can be used, depending on what kind of functionality you will be using with this infrastructure. Of course, you need to have support on these licenses also, and this is rather expensive also. You need a vendor or a supporting firm capable of supporting the functionality and the licenses linked to them.

We are a customer and an end-user.

Last year, this solution was bought by Ivanti. Now it's called Ivanti Connect Secure. Basically, it's been the same product since 2007. It's still the same product yet it has been evolving, of course.

We are using the latest version of the solution. 

I'd advise potential new users to do some homework on what network resources they want to present to their users, and what will be the conditions they will impose on their end-users as for users' credentials, for example, multi-factor authentication for start. Also, they should look at the host checking on their client PCs. For example, they need to consider what will be the conditions to access certain resources, as that will be important for their configuration at the outset.

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.