Bovis Homes Group PLC is a second-tier U.K. industrial company specialized in building residential developments and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index. The company employs more than 1,200 employees and temporary workers—many of whom work at construction sites and off the corporate network.
The Story
The Need For Visibility Across All Endpoints
Bovis Homes had a problem with missing endpoints. Due to a large number of temporary employees working remotely, devices often went rogue. From a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance perspective, lacking clarity on their security posture was concerning. Without knowing how many devices they actually had, the location of each device, as well as the encryption status, Bovis Homes’ IT team realized the company was at risk.
The organization had to make a change. It needed to find a solution that could improve the accuracy of reporting to show a true representation of its endpoint population and provide visibility of all its devices, whether on or off the corporate network. The IT team also wanted to be able to track, trace, and wipe lost or stolen devices and prove encryption is installed and working on all devices to comply with GDPR.
Security Needs
Return on Investment
Unparalleled Insights
GDPR Compliance
"I trust Absolute. We always buy it for every laptop."
PAUL BAIRD,
IT SECURITY OPERATIONS MANAGER
BOVIS HOMES GROUP
The Solutions
How They Did It
Complete Visibility and Control Across Device Fleet
Initially, what intrigued Paul Baird, Bovis Homes’ IT Security Operations Manager, was Absolute Secure Endpoint’s unique endpoint visibility, control, and reporting capabilities. Baird said, “Here is this product that, if a device were stolen, would allow us to track and trace, then remotely wipe it.”
Improved Clarity on Security Posture
Engaging in a proof of concept took the company a step further and showed them whether their anti-virus/anti-malware was installed and up to date, as well as what the status of encryption was at all times on every device. “It’s standard for BitLocker to be installed on all of our endpoints,” continued Baird. “But if it’s not running, then it’s not useful, is it?”
With GDPR, the stakes are high—if a device is unencrypted at the time of a security incident, they would have to report it and face the potentially costly consequences.
Enhanced Reporting Helps Recover Older Devices, Improving Return on Investment
Absolute Secure Endpoint is a staple for all of Bovis Homes’ 1,000 devices. From an asset intelligence perspective, Absolute Secure Endpoint has allowed the company to see a return on investment for its technology. “We can now recover older devices that we were able to refurbish and reuse.”
The Results
Enhanced Security and Asset Management Helps Maintain Compliance
GDPR compliance was a huge concern before Absolute Secure Endpoint. Now, Baird has confidence that the company is taking all the necessary steps to be compliant and can remediate any incidents that could put the company at risk.
For Bovis Homes, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Provides insight into the security posture of devices
- Delivers return on investment for technology through improved asset intelligence
- Aids compliance with GDPR requirements by enabling Bovis Homes to prove encryption is working on the company’s devices
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
Not ready for a demo? Have some questions?