The Cumbria Constabulary is the territorial police force in England covering Cumbria. The force serves more than 500,000 residents and needs resilient network connectivity to support its officers and emergency response efforts. Technology can drive efficiency and empower organizations. The Cumbria Constabulary stands as proof of that. The police force serves the UK’s third-largest ceremonial county by area. Home to more than half a million residents, Cumbria also hosts some of the country’s largest national parks. The sheer size of the region means the police force must rely heavily on technology and cellular networks to ensure a rapid incident response.
The Story
Seamless, Reliable Connectivity for Frontline Officers
All mobile technology deployed to the officers must meet three important criteria: usability—tech must be easy to use without complicated logins; accessibility—anything a user can do at their desk should be available on any device from anywhere; and most importantly, connectivity— remote users must have seamless, secure, reliable access to the Internet, internal resources, and each other.
Security Needs
Stable
Connectivity
Uninterrupted
Secure Access
Optimized
User Experience
"We needed to do things differently, so having access to internal core systems via handheld devices was critical. It means having real-time, up-to-date information available to the officers to inform their decision-making on the ground."
MATTHEW KENNERLEY
SUPERINTENDENT
CUMBRIA CONSTABULARY
The Solutions
How They Did It
Meeting the Technological Demands of a Modern Police Force
To meet these challenges, the Cumbria Constabulary has sought to place itself at the forefront of digital policing in the UK. Since 2016, the constabulary has been implementing the National Enabling Programme’s (NEP) technical infrastructure. The NEP strategy is a nationally assured and designed set of tools available to police forces across Britain. To date, the police force has implemented many successful IT initiatives, including digital evidence solutions, the adoption of Microsoft 365, several device rollouts with Absolute Secure Access and Microsoft Intune®, and most recently, the implementation of a business continuity plan and COVID-19 response effort made possible by the Absolute Secure Access remote access solution.
Improving Communication and Collaboration
Other benefits that the Cumbria Constabulary sees from their digital transformation are improved communication and collaboration through video conferencing using Microsoft Teams® and document sharing in Microsoft OneNote®. Daily operations have also improved. For example, the police force now has the ability to update incident logs in real time. Offender photos are immediately added to any incident log, making the images instantly available to all the deployed officers and tactical advisors.
The Results
Paving the Way for a Zero Trust Strategy
In addition to having a more resilient network due to optimized connectivity, Absolute Secure Access is a key part of the Cumbria Constabulary’s agile IT strategy to adopt Zero Trust and secure remote access. As a result, the police force is now able to implement new ideas and technologies that are making policing better for both frontline officers and IT teams.
For Cumbria Constabulary, Absolute Secure Access:
- Improves daily operations and productivity for the police force
- Provides stable and reliable connectivity, no matter where the user is
- Helps transform the police force's digital policing strategy to meet technological demands
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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Ensuring Critical Security & Productivity Applications are FunctioningLive Webinar - July 23, 2024 | 9AM PT
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