Alan Boswell Group is an independent insurance broker and financial planning firm known for its excellent customer service and expert advice on insurance, risk management, and financial services. The Group serves clients all over the UK from ten regional offices, with financial advisors, claims personnel, and management frequently needing to access sensitive data from home or out at a client's location.
The Story
The Search for a Reliable Secure Access Solution
For the Alan Boswell Group, handling business with clients throughout the UK requires reliable connectivity. Achieving that reliability, however, has not always been easy; often, challenges around Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity impacted productivity due to disconnects and repeated logins. The insurance broker and financial firm desperately needed a more robust remote access solution.
Security Needs
Improved Diagnostics
and Troubleshooting
Enhanced User
Experience
Secure and
Reliable Access
"With the sudden shift to working from home, many businesses will need to reassess their remote access strategies. Virtual meetings have been forced upon lots of people and will become the new normal for many organizations. I'm looking forward to what the future holds and how modern technology, like Absolute Secure Access, will be the foundation."
TOM FISK
IT OPERATIONS MANAGER
ALAN BOSWELL GROUP
The Solutions
How They Did It
Transitioning to a ‘Work-from-Anywhere’ Workforce
After evaluating and then purchasing Absolute Secure Access, the IT team suddenly faced the unexpected challenge of transitioning the entire staff to a work-from-home environment because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only did the IT team need to provide equipment for remote working, but it also needed to ensure that employees had access to all of the files and systems that they had used in the office while ensuring a seamless user experience without disrupting the business.
Enhancing the User Experience with Seamless Access
Alan Boswell Group uses the Absolute Secure Access solution across all of its devices, for laptops, tablets, and desktop PCs, to eliminate dropped connections and multiple logins. Offering a better user experience than their legacy virtual desktop solution could, the Group didn’t hesitate to install Absolute Secure Access on all devices.
Improving Business Continuity, No Matter Where They Are
With Absolute, IT can easily troubleshoot issues remotely and quickly deploy company-issued devices that are configured to connect to the network securely. This has also given the IT team the confidence to roll out new applications, such as Microsoft Teams, for virtual client meetings, with the knowledge that Absolute Secure Access will optimize video and maintain connections. Prior to Absolute, claims assessors needed to carry reams of paperwork to each site, not knowing what files they would need. Now, however, they only need a laptop because they can access the document management system from anywhere.
The Results
Supporting Existing and Future Mobile Strategies with a Modern Solution
Absolute Secure Access delivers a modern, remote access solution that will serve as the fundamental technology to support Alan Boswell Group’s existing and future mobile strategy. IT can quickly resolve any connectivity issues, giving end users a seamless experience with a single login across any network. Importantly, the organization also remains compliant with UK financial authority regulations which require an always-on secure tunnel.
For Alan Boswell Group, Absolute Secure Access has:
- Successfully transitioned 360 staff to ‘work- from-home’ in 72 hours
- Simplified remote troubleshooting for IT
- Enhanced user experience with secure, seamless access to home and third-party Wi-Fi networks
- Provided secure and reliable access to documents from anywhere, even out in the field
- Enhanced business continuity during the pandemic office closure
Absolute Platform FAQ
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.
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