Changes to the University Virtual Private Network (VPN) Service

The current VPN service is offered using Pulse Secure. Increased demand attributed to telecommuting and other remote activities exposed limitations in its deployed capacity and ability to manage higher loads effectively.  ITS explored alternatives, and we have implemented Anyconnect, a widely used Cisco VPN service. We have elected to enable split tunneling on this better scaled replacement, which will allow traffic destined for UConn to traverse down the tunnel with all other Internet traffic going out as it would without the VPN enabled. This feature both reduces VPN load and directly improves performance of network sensitive external applications, such as video conferencing and streaming services. Split tunneling requires sharing the internal address space of the university with connected locations, and we route net 10.0.0.0/8 internally.  If you are using this address range at home or if you are explicitly using an internal UConn IP address to access external services, you should continue to use the existing service to prevent conflicts until you can reconfigure your devices.  The new infrastructure does not currently support privileged access.  If you need this, you should also continue to use Pulse Secure.

Both the Pulse Secure and Anyconnect services will operate concurrently while we work with the community to transition their activities from one to the other.  Information for early adopters is available on the Knowledge Base (KB) Once the new service meets the overwhelming majority of customers and substantive use cases, we will begin to retire Pulse Secure.  This will be communicated to the community well in advance.