The Kwaliteits-Controle-Bureau, or KCB, is tasked with monitoring the quality of fresh fruit and vegetables traded in the Netherlands, as well as conducting import and export inspections of fresh fruit and vegetables, cut flowers, and potted plants/ornamentals. The KCB depends on technology and connectivity to fulfill its mission.
The Story
Need for Reliable and Stable Connectivity
Agriculture is a cornerstone of the Dutch economy. More than half of the Netherlands’ surface area is devoted to agriculture, and the country is a large and diverse importer and exporter of agricultural goods. Quality inspections of fresh fruits and vegetables, cut flowers, and potted plants are the job of the KCB. The KCB relies heavily on technology, for which it is recognized as a model organization within the EU. The KCB’s 120 field workers use mobile devices to carry out their jobs, which involve checking products for quality and health concerns according to established EU regulations. Working out of four regional offices in the Netherlands, they perform around 200,000 inspections every year.
After completing the checks at the border, the inspectors send the approvals via a tablet that is connected to the Internet. If the final step cannot be performed, the whole import or export fails the inspection, and the process comes to a halt. Therefore, a stable Internet connection is vital. When the connection went down, contact was lost with the servers. Workers sometimes had to log in to the system again several times a day to perform the inspection in the right way. The IT help desk also then regularly faced complaints by phone from field workers.
Security Challenges
Reliable
Communication
Secure
Remote Access
Accelerated
Implementation
"The inspection relies on different systems being connected to each other, with human action intervening at the end of the chain."
JAC KARDOLUS
ICT PROJECT MANAGER
KCB
The Solutions
How They Did It
Seamlessly Connect Mobile Devices
Absolute Secure Access offered a simple solution to the problems encountered by the KCB. The solution provides a seamless connection over the wireless network between mobile devices and application servers. It also gives priority to the key application the inspectors rely on to receive inspection requests and complete their jobs.
Resume Applications Without Manual Interference
Absolute Secure Access operates like a virtual layer across all the connection options available to the mobile device, guiding the connections in the best direction without requiring management or intervention by the user. It connects the mobile device to the Internet via Wi-Fi and 3G/4G/5G networks, and if there is no connection available, it simply pauses applications until a connection is available again. At that point, the application session resumes, continuing from where it left off. This happens automatically, without the knowledge of the user or requiring additional steps.
Improve Productivity for Field and IT Workers
Using Absolute technology means that workers at the KCB now only have to log in once at the start of the working day. The situation where workers contact the IT help desk several times a day to report a poor Internet connection is now a thing of the past. Since implementation, there has been virtually no contact any more from them about connection problems. As a result, implementing Absolute Secure Access not only had an impact on field workers, but the IT department can also focus again on its normal activities because of the decrease in the volume of complaints.
The Results
Reliable Access Streamlines Food Inspections
Field workers can now carry out inspections without any problems and also give and send their approval. This eases the pressure and makes the job easier. The clear upshot of this is that less stress can be felt among the workers. With the system doing its job, workers can focus again on doing their job, which is carrying out their inspections.
For the KCB team, Absolute Secure Access:
- Provides an accelerated implementation, completed within days
- Allows reliable communication of inspection approvals
- Reduces help desk calls to near zero
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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