JAFCO Co., Ltd., is a Japan-based powerhouse private equity firm with over $3 billion invested in biotech, electronics, IT services, and more. Since its founding in 1973, the company has been involved in more than 1,000 IPOs in Japan and abroad.
The Story
Transitioning to an Efficient Work Environment for the Mobile Workforce
In 2017, JAFCO decided that it needed to help its employees adapt to the changing economy. With its gradual shift towards a portfolio focused on early-stage investments—particularly in the IT services sector—JAFCO realized that its employees desired more flexibility in the way they worked. They were dealing with more off-site meetings, yet they still needed access to critical business data and applications while they were away from the office. The company had been relying on a VPN solution with an onerous three-step login process that generated a lot of complaints from employees.
The company embarked on a radical plan to eliminate fixed seating at its offices and gave its mobile workforce the tools they needed to create a more productive and efficient work environment. As part of its digital transformation, working hours were also made completely flexible, giving employees the freedom to work from anywhere, at any time.
Security Challenges
Seamless
Operations
Secure
Remote Access
Improved
Efficiencies
"We soon discovered the performance benefits of Absolute Secure Access. We did an early rollout to our IT staff to help iron out any issues, but thanks to not requiring hardware, they were able to adjust configurations and get Absolute Secure Access up and running very quickly."
NARUTOMO MATSUO
CIO
JAFCO
The Solutions
How They Did It
Provide Security and Seamless Operations
JAFCO chose Absolute Secure Access for its powerful and easily configurable mobile VPN. Once deployed across the company’s network and mobile devices, employees could securely access highly sensitive documents from anywhere, even when visiting customers. Absolute Secure Access quickly became indispensable to JAFCO’s infrastructure. Users had been concerned about the possible impact of compression on video quality. However, the solution’s proprietary end-to-end data encryption, application prioritization, and compression technologies won employees over with secure and stutter-free video conferencing and other data-intensive applications, even over 4G connections.
Build a Frictionless Experience for Employees
Narutomo Matsuo, JAFCO’s CIO, explained that he considered five or six other solutions, but he found them to be either lacking in features or too expensive. Since deploying Absolute Secure Access company-wide, the company is proud that it has been able to build a frictionless experience for employees while giving them complete access to the internal systems they need. Rather than burdening employees with restrictive policies about device usage, JAFCO’s implementation of Absolute Secure Access allows the IT team to establish dynamic policies that ensure security and seamless operation.
The Results
Improved Productivity and Efficiencies Without Compromising on Security
JAFCO is currently considering ways to expand its adoption of Absolute Secure Access. The company is excited about what it has achieved so far in improving employee efficiency and the overall work experience. It is now turning its attention to making more improvements, not only for itself but also for the companies in which it invests.
For JAFCO, Absolute Secure Access:
- Allows employees to log into internal systems without multiple steps
- Provides the security and seamless operation users need with dynamic policies
- Builds a frictionless experience for employees while giving them access to internal systems that they need
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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