London, United Kingdom – April 7, 2020 – To protect their communities, firefighters at Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service (DWFRS) use on-vehicle mobile devices for vital communication and information during incident response and Community Safety activities. To ensure the security of those critical devices and the sensitive data they hold, they selected Absolute® (TSX: ABT), the leader in endpoint resilience, for comprehensive endpoint visibility and control.
DWFRS has 50 fire stations that serve the communities of Dorset and Wiltshire, England. Crews are available to respond to emergency calls 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They deploy Panasonic Toughbook CF-33 devices across their fleet of fire appliances, each with one mounted in the front and another demountable in the back. They hold key incident response data forms, standard operating procedures, essential operational information, vehicle schematics, chemical and hazardous materials database, water supplies and Ordnance Survey mapping, as well as providing a critical communication platform back to the Control room.
Ensuring crews could quickly log in and communicate securely at the scene had been a challenge and they wanted to ensure devices could be tracked if they went missing. To track, manage, repair and recover all of their devices, including Panasonic Toughbooks and others, and ensure tamper-proof security and privacy of sensitive information, they turned to Absolute’s patented Persistence® technology.
“We evaluated several track-and-freeze vendors, but it was our Panasonic representative who introduced us to Absolute,” said Daniel Grew, Mobile Data Technology Manager at DWFRS. Absolute is installed in the BIOS at the manufacturer-level and simply needs to be activated on devices. It was already in the Panasonic Toughbooks that DWFRS firefighters were using.
Absolute’s Persistence technology enables a self-healing, two-way connection to any activated endpoint, whether the device is on or off the network. It provides an adaptive layer of defense by notifying IT of where devices are and triggering automatic reinstallation when critical security applications are removed or corrupted.. Because Absolute is already embedded in the BIOS of Panasonic, Dell, Lenovo, HP and 21 other leading manufacturers’ devices for vendor-agnostic coverage, time to value is quick.
Absolute Persistence provides DWFRS with a single source of truth for the protection of their life-saving devices and the sensitive data that resides on them.
“For me, deploying Absolute is about assurance. I don’t have to worry. I get alerts when a device leaves a boundary and alerts if someone is using too much data on the hard drive. Absolute lets me report back that if we are ever in a situation, I have the confidence that I can remotely freeze it,” said Daniel Grew.
“Absolute’s endpoint visibility and control helps emergency responders secure their critical devices and the sensitive personal data they deal with on a daily basis,” said Ray Powell, EMEA Channel Sales Director at Absolute. “Being able to provide them with confidence that their data is secure is both important and rewarding.”
To read the full case study, visit here. To learn more about Absolute, visit www.absolute.com.