Featured Announcement

Changes to Transition Plans for VPN service

Posted on by

The University’s legacy Pulse Secure VPN infrastructure was inadequate to meet growing needs, and we chose industry leading Cisco AnyConnect as its successor. Both solutions are in production today. We configured AnyConnect as split-tunnel. This is industry best practice and ensures that traffic destined for UConn goes through the encrypted VPN while all other traffic transits normally to the Internet. This means that when AnyConnect is in use, you can fully access protected resources on the UConn network without degrading externally hosted streaming and videoconferencing services. With many at the University working remotely on any given day, this was a key factor.

Many have elected to access journal articles directly using our VPN service instead of the library EZproxy service that was designed and deployed specifically to facilitate authenticated remote access to online resources. Using AnyConnect for this does not work because remote connections do not appear as UConn hosts to journal providers. We received feedback that the transition from Pulse Secure to AnyConnect was much more noticeable for patrons accustomed to accessing journals this way.

Our general recommendation is that you should continue the transition to AnyConnect if it better meets your needs, but we are also delaying the formal retirement of Pulse Secure while we work with the community to address access issues. Your patience is appreciated.