The corporate portal continues to evolve, with Sun Microsystems Monday adding identity-enabled remote access to its portal product, opening up the platform to remote users.

The Sun One Portal Server, Secure Remote Access 6 platform offers an out-of-the-box alternative to traditional virtual private network (VPN) offerings, Sun said.

With the platform, users can securely access a corporate portal via any standard Web browser, gaining access to their data, applications, and Web services when away from the office.

The cost-savings comes by eliminating the need to deploy special client VPN software or modem pools to control and secure that remote access. So-called client-less VPN options are proliferating; Sun is one of the first vendors to specifically tie the concept to the enterprise portal.

Portals already have authentication and identity-management technologies at their core. Leveraging those platforms into a remote access solution can reduce complexity and save money, Sun said.

While many VPN solutions target small pools of users, Sun said its new platform is ideally suited for large-scale portal deployments. The Sun One Portal Server provides security and authentication--user policy, single sign-on, and a management console-- and serves as the centralized policy server for customer deployments.

The Sun One Portal Server, Secure Remote Access 6 product will be available within 60 days; it requires and includes a two CPU license for $95,000. Additional CPUs of Sun One Portal Server, Secure Remote Access 6 are available for $47,500 per CPU.