TasNetworks delivers power across Tasmania—the southernmost state of Australia. As the owner and operator of the utility, TasNetworks provides the electricity transmission and distribution network that delivers a safe, cost-effective, and reliable electricity supply to more than 285,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers. With more than 50 depots dotted over an area roughly the size of Switzerland, the company’s 700 field workers pride themselves on rapidly investigating and restoring power after service outages anywhere across the state.
The Story
Improve Efficiencies and Connectivity for a Distributed Workforce
Keeping a workforce connected and productive across a variety of terrains can be a challenge for any company. In the case of TasNetworks, field workers were often frustrated by devices that looked connected but weren’t and dropped connections in poor coverage areas. End users found themselves wasting critical time due to disruptions caused whenever Windows timed out while roaming between Wi-Fi and cellular networks, especially if it occurred during a mobile work manager sync. Their workaround was to connect their devices via Ethernet at each depot and wait for the sync to complete, often wasting several hours each day. Compounding these issues, the IT team had limited visibility into what was really going on throughout the remote network.
Security Challenges
Reduced Data Issues
Secure and Reliable Access
Increased Visibility and Management
"The flexibility of Absolute Secure Access is amazing. I was able to quickly set up DNS-based split tunneling using granular policies for a group using Teams hosted in the cloud when they suddenly had to work from home. It just worked, which was awesome. There’s no way we could have done that with our old VPN."
TRISTAN ROBERTS
TEAM LEADER, INFRASTRUCTURE
TASNETWORKS
The Solutions
How They Did It
Transitioning to a Seamless Remote Work Structure
After learning about Absolute Secure Access from another Australian utility, TasNetworks started a proof of concept to solve the field workers’ connectivity issues. Once COVID-19 restrictions started taking effect, and all employees suddenly found themselves working remotely from home, their existing SSL VPN couldn’t scale to accommodate the 1,100+ workforce. As a result, the decision was made to go with Absolute Secure Access company-wide, including office workers using desktops and laptops from their new home offices.
Providing a Secure and Reliable Connection
TasNetworks uses the Absolute solution to provide a reliable connection for all remote users as well as the troubleshooting tools, policies, geolocation features, coverage mapping capabilities, and advanced analytics dashboards so IT can see what is happening in their mobile deployment.
The Results
Enhanced Visibility = Improved Productivity and Business Continuity
In addition to secure, reliable remote access and positive user experience for end users, Absolute Secure Access provides the IT team with the visibility, management, and troubleshooting tools needed to keep the workforce productive and the business running smoothly. The solution’s dashboards provide IT with information about their mobile devices and user behavior including lost device identification, service coverage mapping, as well as data usage.
For the TasNetworks team, Absolute Secure Access:
- Reduces data usage by 25% with data compression
- Quickly transitioned field and office workforce to ‘work-from-home’ during the pandemic office closure
- Provides secure and reliable access to applications and data from anywhere
- Increases efficiency of their mobile work management app by 25% due to an uninterrupted sync process and more productive time in the field for workers
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
Ensuring Critical Security & Productivity Applications are FunctioningLive Webinar - July 23, 2024 | 9AM PT
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Network Performance & Diagnostics for Today’s OrganizationsLive Webinar - July 16, 2024 | 9AM PT
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