- Provide Secure Remote Access to Corporate Applications and Data. IAG 2007 helps you control access through unified SSL VPN, application-layer filtering, and endpoint security management, providing employees with secure intranet access to critical applications, documents, and data from a broad range of devices and locations.
- Strengthen Information Security Specific to Your Environment. With flexible and differentiated access to extranet resources for employees and partners to Web and legacy applications, IAG 2007 protects infrastructure through easily adaptable application-specific security.
- Defend Against Web-based Data Exploits and Theft. IAG 2007 enables Internet-based and mobile access from unmanaged endpoints, and enforces proper information usage with granular identity-based policies, helping the business comply with legal and regulatory guidelines.
There’s a pretty good overview on the Microsoft website.
Some people I know and trust with this stuff have been working with Whale’s solution for a while now. They like it. What’s more, customers who ran it on trial liked it. Customers who consider security to be critical (read this as major financials) liked it.
As usual, there’ll be those who use the "we won’t use a Microsoft firewall … it’s just proxy server and full of bugs" line. Their loss, really. If they want to bleed money through the nose for the old dinosaur solutions that are painful to manage and horrible for users to live with then good for them. You can read my recent article on Microsoft software not being "scalable nor secure" to see what I think of those people who rely on no longer relevant sterotypes.