Many IT departments deployed Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) as a reverse proxy for business applications like Exchange and SharePoint, and to help provide security for the application servers. TMG was a pretty unique product that is no longer developed and maintained by Microsoft. So what can you do to replace TMG with a supported solution that is being developed going forward? Especially in your test environments or test and development DevOps workflows. You will be looking for a solution that delivers as many of TMG’s features as possible. Features like a firewall, forward proxy, reverse proxy, network load balancing, user pre-authentication, content filtering, VPN, remote access provision, high availability and HTTPS inspection.
It’s unlikely that you will find a single product that will fully replicate the feature list that TMG delivered. But the free Kemp LoadMaster Load Balancer will deliver most of the functionality you need. You may find that it has enough functionality to allow the free load balancer to replace TMG when combined with our Edge Security Pack and Web Application Firewall modules.
LoadMaster coupled with these two additional modules provides many of the important features that TMG delivered. Indeed, in several areas the free LoadMaster exceeds the functionality of TMG in important and beneficial ways. The enhancements include:
- Layer 7 Application & Content Inspection based load balancing
- Layer 4 Transport layer based load balancing
- Geolocation based load balancing
- Server health monitoring
- WAN Acceleration
- SNORT based Intrusion Prevention
- User Pre-authentication and Policy enforcement based on Active Directory
- Single Sign on support
- Dual Factor authentication support
- Real Time network monitoring
- SSL inspection
- SSL Offloading
- Reverse Proxy
- Protection against OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities
For many uses these features will deliver a replacement for TMG that more than meets requirements. If there is a need to replace the TMG VPN, content filtering or firewall features then a Dell SonicWall firewall can be coupled with LoadMaster to provide an integrated solution to deliver those additional features.
The free LoadMaster load balancer is available to download now. Grab a copy and see how easy it is to deploy, configure and manage. Take the first step in replacing your TMG