As a globally renowned, fully integrated M&A consultancy, Lincoln International offers services on all matters related to corporate finance, mergers, and acquisitions. The company also advises clients on a host of needs, ranging from capital increases and company valuations to strategies for successful joint ventures. Leading this work is a dedicated team of more than 600 investment bankers and advisors working in Lincoln International’s 22 offices around the world.
The Story
Guarantee Secure, ‘Always-On’ Connectivity
The IT strategy at Lincoln International requires secure, seamless, ‘always-on’ connectivity for mobile workers that also conserves resources. Since the company often processes highly sensitive customer data, it is essential to adhere to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other regulatory requirements. IT teams must therefore meet the strictest standards in terms of data protection and security.
Lincoln International uses Microsoft 365® and currently operates file servers in Germany. But as the company moves toward its multi-cloud goal, it is increasingly shifting elements of its IT to the cloud. The company’s previous VPN provider was a well-known firewall manufacturer that specialized in data access. Over time, however, managing this solution became very complex and time-consuming for users, who had to log in manually, open a VPN tunnel and carry out further steps. In addition to these problems, the IT team had to deal with a separate database of usernames and passwords. The high manual effort, lengthy processes, and the susceptibility to errors were the main reasons for the decision to replace this legacy VPN solution.
Security Challenges
Reliable Mobile
Connectivity
Device Monitoring
and Visibility
Secure Access to
Corporate Resources
"Absolute Secure Access now makes it much easier, safer, and more convenient for our mobile employees to use IT — anywhere, anytime."
SVEN GÖLLES
HEAD OF IT, EUROPE
LINCOLN INTERNATIONAL
The Solutions
How They Did It
Improved Network Visibility and Management
As a solution, Lincoln International has leveraged a remote connectivity product from Absolute since 2012. Its architecture enables IT monitoring and visibility of all mobile devices, all the way to the edge, regardless of the networks being used. A small Absolute Secure Access Client is installed on every mobile device and is ready for immediate use without any maintenance or manual setup of VPN tunnels.
Always-On Connectivity
Thanks to Absolute Secure Access, the optimized secure tunnel is always active in the background and can be used on demand. Better yet, the Absolute Secure Access Client acts as a distributed client firewall, preventing lateral movement through a network. This ensures excellent visibility and management, even in networks not owned or operated by the company.
The Results
Secure and Reliable Mobile Connectivity for the Anywhere Workforce
Like most companies, Lincoln International has had to adapt to a radically new working environment. Absolute Secure Access has been an integral part of the company’s successful transition.
For Lincoln International, Absolute Secure Access:
- Provides stable, secure mobile connectivity for all employees, including back-office staff
- Delivers simplified, reliable, and secure access to the corporate network without additional tools
- Enables remote access to office hardware resources from anywhere
- Delivers secure remote access powered by single sign-on (SSO) and session resilience, giving workers an always-on connection to critical applications
- Easy visibility and management of the solution, allowing IT to proactively troubleshoot remote issues
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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