Emergency Communications of Southern Oregon (ECSO) is an emergency dispatch facility that provides public safety communication services for more than 200,000 residents and dispatch for 28 agencies. ECSO’s small IT team supports the agency’s entire network infrastructure, including servers and workstations, as well as always-operational mobile devices located in 220 fire and police vehicles.
The Story
Ensure Endpoints Remain in IT’s View
When it comes to law enforcement and public safety organizations, protecting data and devices is a must. The stringent Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy requires ECSO devices to be under IT control at all times. The challenge for ECSO came when the VPN connection between the network and the mobile devices in the field was broken. The lack of visibility and control over endpoints also had the potential to create critical situations for police officers and other emergency personnel.
Officers need to be able to use their devices securely in the field to aid in response and investigations. With this in mind, the IT team sought a solution that could help them ensure endpoints in the field remain visible to IT and connected to the network at all times. It was vital to ensure applications on all devices were working, and those that were not could be remediated using automation. The final piece was the ability to prove device encryption and the capability to wipe devices remotely as part of CJIS compliance.
Security Challenges
CJIS
Compliance
Increased
Efficiency
Saves
Lives
"I was really impressed with Absolute’s ability to see any device and remotely freeze or wipe it, as well as to monitor and prove encryption status. Field officers also need uninterrupted access to crucial data to make the right decision on the appropriate protocol in seconds, so keeping their computers up and running with Absolute Secure Endpoint could save their lives."
COREY NELSON
MANAGER, IT
ECSO
The Solutions
How They Did It
Improved Control and Visibility of Endpoints in the Field
By leveraging Absolute Secure Endpoint, ECSO gained improved visibility and control over their devices in the field. “I’ve now got a single pane of glass to see each device and its status,” said Corey Nelson, Manager of IT at ECSO. “It’s been wonderful seeing where our devices are and all the information about them. I don’t have to worry or dig into the data. I just turn on the reports I want and let Absolute tell me, ‘hey, you need to look at this; there’s a problem here.’”
Keeping Mission-Critical Applications Accessible and Connected
Uninterrupted access to critical applications and data allows field officers to follow situation-appropriate protocols. Absolute Secure Endpoint enables IT to make those mission-critical applications that are covered in the Absolute Application ResilienceTM catalog resilient to external factors, keeping them available for field officers who rely on the information when deciding which protocol to use. “Field officers need crucial data to make the right decision in seconds,” Nelson continued. “So keeping their computers up and running with Absolute could save their lives.”
Maintaining Compliance Through Asset Management
Deploying Absolute Secure Endpoint means the ECSO IT team can see, manage, and secure their endpoints. It is now much easier for ECSO to comply with CJIS Security Policy through device tracking, encryption status monitoring, and remote-wipe capabilities.
The Results
Secured Endpoints + Uninterrupted Access = Saved Lives
Instant deployment and automated processes free up IT for other mission-critical tasks. With a lean team, any time saved can be put toward ensuring the personnel in the field are optimally set up to help protect their community.
For the ECSO team. Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Helps ECSO comply with CJIS Security Policy mandates
- Provides a quick deployment, improving IT efficiency
- Enhances the IT team’s visibility and control of devices in the field
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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Secure Endpoint
Mitigating Zero-Day Threats in a Complex Cybersecurity LandscapeLive Webinar - Sept 17, 2024 | 9AM PT
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Leveraging AI to Protect Against Modern Cybersecurity ThreatsLive Webinar - Oct 1, 2024 | 9AM PT
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