Verkehrsbetriebe Karlsruhe GmbH (VBK) has been offering attractive public transport for many decades as a cost-effective and ecologically sensible alternative to individual transport. With around 1,300 employees, a close-knit network of routes stretches from the Rhine to the high-altitude districts, on which modern trams and buses offer a frequent service almost around the clock. In addition to the pure transport services, VBK also has large building yards, workshops and an efficient IT department that also provides IT services for the subsidiary, Albtal-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft mbH and the Karlsruhe Transport Association.
The Story
Improve Connectivity for a Distributed Workforce
Ensuring seamless, secure, and reliable connectivity is one of the tasks of the 30-person IT department at VBK. Stability and bandwidth are important because the employees use SAP from the municipal data center, for example. For a few years, a tailor-made solution from a classic security provider in the form of a firewall VPN was used, followed by the implementation of Microsoft‘s DirectAccess VPN, which didn’t meet functionality expectations, was unstable, and proved to be complex to use and maintain. The decision was made to procure a modern solution for secure connectivity.
Security Challenges
Seamless Remote
Access
Improved
Use Experience
Always-On
Connectivity
"Our approximately 400 administrative employees use the Absolute Secure Access technology constantly — whether in the on-site office, in the home office or on the move."
MOHAMMED AMINE
PROJECT MANAGER
VBK
The Solutions
How They Did It
Secure Remote Access Enhances User Experience
Absolute Secure Access came off best in an evaluation because of its seamless roaming and always-on connectivity. The fact that it is extremely stable and very easy to use resulted in minimal effort for both IT administrators and end users.
The Results
Expanding the Modern Secure Access Solution
VBK is currently in the process of expanding the use of Absolute Secure Access to additional functional areas outside of administration. The plan is to install the solution in maintenance and in other departments on around 1,000 clients. In the final expansion stage, Absolute Secure Access should run on all mobile devices from VBK and AVG, including the tablets of the train drivers.
For VBK, Absolute Secure Access:
- Eliminates the need for users to manually start the VPN and authenticate.
- Manages data connection independently and ensures a seamless and high-performance connection.
- Provides a user-friendly and low-maintenance solution, both as a client and as a server.
- Creates the prerequisites for seamless, secure, and reliable connectivity across the entire company and a successful path into the future with the use of Absolute Secure Access’ SDP functionality.
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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