Dell SonicWALL Secure Mobile Access 8.5
Administration Guide
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Application Offloading provides secure access to both internal and publicly hosted Web applications. An
application offloading host is created as a special-purpose portal with an associated virtual host acting as a
proxy for the backend Web application.
Unlike HTTP(S) bookmarks, access to offloaded applications is not limited to remote users. The administrator
can enforce strong authentication and access policies for specific users or groups. For instance, in an
organization certain guest users might need Two-factor or Client Certificate authentication to access Outlook
Web Access (OWA), but are not allowed to access OWA public folders. If authentication is enabled, multiple
layers of advanced authentication features such as One Time Password, Two-factor Authentication, Client
Certificate Authentication and Single Sign-On can be applied on top of each other for the offloaded host.
The offloaded application portal must be configured as a virtual host with a suitable Secure Mobile Access
domain. It is possible to disable authentication and access policy enforcement for such an offloaded host.
Web transactions can be centrally monitored by viewing the logs. In addition, Web Application Firewall can
protect offloaded application hosts from any unexpected intrusion, such as Cross-site scripting or SQL Injection.
Access to offloaded Web applications happens seamlessly as URLs in the proxied page are not rewritten in the
manner used by HTTP or HTTPS bookmarks.
Benefits of HTTP(S) Bookmarks
By using HTTP(S) bookmarks, users can access the full-featured versions of SharePoint 2007, Microsoft OWA
Premium, and Domino Web Access 8.0.1, 8.5.1, and 8.5.2 Web mail interfaces. These interfaces are easier to
use and provide more enhanced features than their basic counterparts.
Benefits of Application Offloading
An offloaded Web application has the following advantages over configuring the Web application as an HTTP(S)
bookmark in Secure Mobile Access:
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No URL rewriting is necessary, thereby improving throughput significantly.
•
The functionality of the original Web application is retained almost completely, while an HTTP(S)
bookmark is a best-effort solution.
•
Application offloading extends Secure Mobile Access security features to publicly hosted Web sites.
Application offloading can be used in any of the following scenarios:
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To function as an SSL offloader and add HTTPS support to the offloaded Web application, using SSL
acceleration of the SMA/SRA appliance.
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In conjunction with the Web Application Firewall subscription service to provide the offloaded Web
application continuous protection from malicious Web attacks.
•
To add strong or stacked authentication to the offloaded Web application, including Two-factor
authentication, One Time Passwords and Client Certificate authentication.
•
To control granular access to the offloaded Web application using global, group or user based access
policies.
•
To support Web applications not currently supported by HTTP/HTTPS bookmarks. Application Offloading
does not require URL rewriting, thereby delivering complete application functionality without
compromising throughput.
•
To authenticate ActiveSync Application Offloading technology that delivers Web applications using
Virtual Hosting and Reverse Proxy. ActiveSync authentication does not require URL rewriting in order to
deliver the Web applications seamlessly. As an example, the ActiveSync protocol is used by a mobile
phone’s email client to synchronize with an Exchange server, as explained in
