Covering a wide range of applications and devices, as well as good authentication support, was the Citrix Access Gateway, the bronze medal-winner in SearchNetworking's 2008 Product Leadership Awards.

Nearly three-fourths of users surveyed rated the Citrix Access Gateway good or excellent in breadth/variety of applications and devices covered, with the majority of those in the "excellent" category. The product was also highly rated for its authentication support, with 77% of respondents rating it good or excellent.

According to Citrix, the Access Gateway SSL VPN uses a policy-based control for secure application delivery. This "SmartAccess" policy-based control allows administrators to control access and actions based on both the user and the endpoint device -- easing and strengthening implementation of corporate security policies.

Citrix's website says that the Access Gateway was designed to be easy to deploy, administer and use. It has a single point of access and single sign-on capabilities to minimize the number of authentication prompts. On the administrator side, the Access Gateway client is Web-deployed and automatically updated without user intervention.

One reader pointed out that the product has some "issues with compatibility with [Windows] Vista," but that it was "otherwise great."