Cox Communications, the third-largest cable provider in the U.S., delivers voice, video, and data services to approximately six million residential and commercial customers. Every year, its 3,500 field-service technicians handle more than six million work orders.
The Story
Difficulty Connecting Remotely Causes Service Delays
At Cox Communications, field workers are constantly on the move, performing new customer installations and upgrades, as well as service repairs. Technicians use mobile devices connected to a cellular network to access their work order management system. However, the company noticed that a disproportionate amount of time was being spent on getting a connection relative to work orders. Field staff had difficulty connecting remotely to their work order management system, causing delays in service. The field staff was also calling and texting the back office to gather customer info when a connection could not be made.
Security Challenges
Reduced
Repair Times
Improved
Productivity
Estimated $500,000
Annual Cost Savings
"Absolute Secure Access software helps us overcome everyday wireless coverage gaps and interruptions. Their solution is helping to make our field service operation more efficient, ultimately helping us to deliver better service to our customers."
AL BRIGGS
DIRECTOR OF MOBILE SOLUTION SERVICES
COX COMMUNICATIONS
The Solutions
How They Did It
Securely Extending Applications for Remote Workers
The company learned of Absolute Secure Access and asked for a demo to see how the solution could help workers get and stay connected no matter where they were working. The demo showed that Absolute Secure Access, in conjunction with an EV-DO mobile broadband solution from Sprint, safely and securely extended Cox’s LAN-based applications for mobile workers.
Seamless Connectivity and Access = Reduced IT Support Tickets
With higher connection speeds and the seamless connectivity provided by Absolute Secure Access, field technicians have access to the entire backend work order management system, which reduces the number of voice and text interactions with the back office. In addition, with Sybase Anywhere’s Afaria product complementing the management capabilities of Absolute Secure Access, Cox can deploy and update the software on its mobile devices remotely.
Improving Productivity Across the Board
On top of the broad efficiency gains in handling work orders, Cox noted a 10 percent bump in productivity in many cases. This was due to the faster connectivity, as well as access to a broader set of applications, including customer service, testing, standard email, HR systems, and training. Absolute Secure Access simplified the management of the deployment by delivering a real-time, system-wide view of device activity, including application use, device connections, and battery life
The Results
Reduced Support Hours Achieve Cost Savings Estimated at Half a Million per Year
Absolute Secure Access also offers customizable policies that allow IT administrators to better manage application and network access, quarantine lost or stolen devices, and prioritize bandwidth for critical transmissions and applications. Being able to deploy and update software remotely helped Cox cut down on support and maintenance hours and saved the company an estimated half million dollars a year.
For the Cox team, Absolute Secure Access:
- Improves productivity by 10% in many cases
- Reduces repair times
- Provides IT cost savings estimated at $500,000 annually
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.
Like what you're hearing?
We’d love to show you how Absolute can secure and empower your organization.
Looking for more information? Join a product overview webinar
Secure Endpoint
Mitigating Zero-Day Threats in a Complex Cybersecurity LandscapeLive Webinar - Sept 17, 2024 | 9AM PT
Secure Access
Leveraging AI to Protect Against Modern Cybersecurity ThreatsLive Webinar - Oct 1, 2024 | 9AM PT
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