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The Internet was hardly stunned by Microsoft’s announcement on December 17, 2013, that it was killing off one of the last remnants of its Forefront product line: Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG).
UAG’s sister product, Forefront Threat Management Gateway (or as many know it, ISA Server), was already put out to pasture in 2012, but the silence around the future roadmap for UAG made many uneasy, particularly as UAG used a base install of Threat Management Gateway to secure itself.
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In a way, UAG was always a time-bound product. It came to Microsoft as the result of the acquisition of Whale Communications in 2006, serving a purpose that was appropriate at the time: to provide fat clients access to internal services from remote locations. Throughout, Microsoft had been billing UAG as a great product to use as a reverse proxy, publishing internal services out to beyond the edge of the network in a secure, inspected way. With a huge service pack after its release, UAG also served to provide a much-needed shortcut in the Windows Server 2008 R2 era to get the DirectAccess remote access and management solution working without tying yourself in knots. For those companies not interested in deploying DirectAccess, it also made a capable SSL VPN solution for secure work on the go.
Nowadays, however, people need more than fat client solutions. Tablets are everywhere. Devices are personally owned. And most organizations are interested in exposing and publishing services as opposed to working on virtual desktops and VPNs (and there are still great solutions available for both of those latter scenarios). Microsoft didn’t see much use for a standalone UAG product going into the future, so it was canned among its transition to a devices and services company.
That is not much solace to UAG’s installed base. If you are one of those folks, it falls to you to find a replacement solution. Here are four options that may work for your organization.
You might, however, be spending big bucks for these solutions.
The good news for UAG users in all of this? You will be supported through April 14, 2015, with standard patches and telephone support, and the product enters extended support after that until April 14, 2020 – more than six years from the time of this writing. So the barn is not burning down immediately, but a replacement for UAG should be on your medium term search list.
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