Meta-Hop™

The Nokia IP VPN suite of products uses Nokia's patent-pending Meta-Hop™ technology to provide a necessary balance between an exceptional mobile user experience and compliance with corporate security policies. Meta-Hop tightly integrates routing and IPSec VPN technology to ensure that application servers and offices are available to accommodate the high demands of a mobile world. As a result, users in the office or on the go can get connected to business applications and information from wherever they may be working.

Meta-Hop delivers a unique combination of capabilities:

Integrated Mobility - connecting users to applications and information

Meta-Hop allows mobile users to access corporate information from business-optimized devices, such as the Nokia 9500 Communicator and Nokia 9300. Users simply open an application and authenticate themselves. On the backend, a VPN tunnel is created in accordance with corporate security policies. All of the data is secured all the way from the corporate network to the user's device. As a result, the users benefit from an experience that is intuitive and easy to use.

Intelligent VPN - maintains access to applications and information

Further enhancing the user experience, Meta-Hop includes self-learning and self-healing properties to help ensure that secure access to business application servers is maintained.

Self-Learning: When a new application server or subnet is added to a local network, Meta-Hop automatically distributes the availability of new resources to all gateways within a VPN deployment. This saves administrators from having to manually configure all of the gateways in a site-to-site VPN any time there is a change to the network.

Self-Healing: If a route between two locations in a VPN fails, Meta-Hop routes the VPN around the problem automatically without IT having to manually configure any special parameters to maintain the IPSec connections. As a result, users do not know there was a problem and IT saves maintenance time.

Patented IP Clustering - reliability of a gateway

Enabled by the Nokia patented IP Clustering technology, IP VPN sessions are preserved and dynamically balanced across all gateways within a cluster to optimized throughput and performance. An entire gateway can be upgraded without taking it off-line. As a result, users are able to access corporate applications and information no matter where in the world they may be.