Osborne Clarke is an award-winning international legal practice with offices situated around Europe, Asia, and the USA. The firm boasts over 270 partners and over 900 lawyers in 25 locations.
The Story
Address Visibility and Connection Issues
Growing pains were creating a challenge for Osborne Clarke. In a short period of time, the law firm rapidly scaled internationally and enabled all employees with laptops through their agile IT strategy and ‘Connected Working Policy. Like many other firms, Osborne Clarke experienced various connectivity difficulties with fee earners traveling, working remotely, commuting, and visiting clients. The firm’s IT team attempted to enable fee earners to use this time as if they were still in the office. However, factoring in unreliable connectivity and variable network conditions outside the office environment made this a growing problem.
For Osborne Clarke’s IT team, deeper visibility into how apps, networks, and devices were being utilized and performed whilst in or out of the office was required. This would ensure that issues could be identified quickly and reduce the amount of service desk tickets being raised.
Security Challenges
Real-time
Insights
Always-on
Connectivity
Improved User
Experience
"As an IT team, we used to support 25 offices globally. With the shift to remote working due to the pandemic, we’re now effectively supporting 2,000 offices globally. Absolute Insights™ for Network, which is part of the Absolute Secure Access offering is the perfect tool for us, as now we know exactly what’s going on. The tool gives us instantly real insight into the overall user experience."
MYLES MANNING
CLIENT INTERFACE AND SOLUTIONS MANAGER,
OSBORNE CLARKE
The Solutions
How They Did It
Ensure Remote Workers Stay Connected
As Osborne Clarke replaced its existing legacy VPN tool, which struggled to meet these new demands, the simple-to-manage Absolute Secure Access solution (including both best-in-class optimized secure tunnel and Zero Trust Network Access capabilities) gave fee earners a completely secure environment to access company resources. This also allowed users to avoid application timeouts and re-authentication whenever connections dropped or switched.
Optimized Video Application Traffic
Osborne Clarke also faced a number of challenges around accessing corporate resources, including its video conference solution. The Absolute Secure Access policy engine enabled the firm to shape network traffic to help balance security measures with a seamless user experience for its remote workers. Using the solution's granular split-tunneling capability, the firm is now able to secure, monitor, and control traffic flowing both inside and outside the optimized tunnel. This is helping them transition to the cloud in a flexible manner as they split more cloud traffic out of the tunnel.
Real-Time Insights Into Connection Performance
In addition, Absolute Secure Access includes digital monitoring capabilities, which keep a comprehensive record of connections and connection failures, with detailed reasonings for any issues impacting remote workers. Osborne Clarke can now proactively and efficiently identify, diagnose, and fix issues related to remote working, decreasing the mean time to resolution for support desk teams and reducing downtime for employees.
The Results
Providing a Persistent Connection for the Remote Workforce
Absolute Secure Access now plays a pivotal role in Osborne Clarke’s security and connectivity stack as the firm continues to make the shift to meet the demands of the remote workforce. Absolute Secure Access provides an encrypted, persistent connection for fee earners and senior partners to ensure they have the same reliable in-office experience anywhere they choose to work.
For Osborne Clarke, Absolute Secure Access:
- Ensures remote workers stay connected to their devices and applications
- Allows support teams to proactively identify, diagnose, and remediate remote working issues impacting fee earners
- Provides real-time insight into performance and utilization of technology being used outside the office environment
- Provides an always-on connectivity using tunnel and session resilience, allowing users to have a seamless and office-like experience wherever they choose to work
- Optimizes video and audio application traffic and improves end user experience on video conferencing tools
- Ensures an improved user experience while working remotely with a powerful policy engine to automatically prioritize, visualize, and shape traffic (inside and outside the tunnel)
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
Secure Access
Leveraging AI to Protect Against Modern Cybersecurity ThreatsLive Webinar - Oct 1, 2024 | 9AM PT
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