Finanz Informatik is the dedicated IT service provider for Germany’s Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. Finanz Informatik’s solutions support standardization and automation initiatives within the financial group, strengthening the institution’s competitiveness. Using their Office_neo platform, Finanz Informatik has reimagined the digital workplace of the future for Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. This new platform enables faster, more flexible, and more efficient communication inside the network. In addition to applications for classic office communication, such as email and calendars, the product family also includes solutions for internal and cross-institution collaboration, including Skype for Business.
The Story
Securing Applications for a Distributed Workforce
Security is a top priority for the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. The applications not only need to meet the highest regulatory and security requirements for online and mobile banking, the IT infrastructure for communication solutions must also meet other high security and stability demands. Despite the high bar, user experience must not suffer. The events of 2020 also presented additional challenges in terms of video communication and increased the demand for mobile solutions to support the group’s distributed workforce.
Security Needs
Secure
Remote Access
Reliable
Connectivity
Improved
User Experience
It is important that the secure transfer of video data does not compromise the performance and stability of the connection. It is just as important that everything run in the background without user involvement. This has to be invisible to the user. With Absolute Secure Access, Skype for Business is now secure, high-performing, and stable, exactly the way we wanted it.
SERGEJ BEILMANN
HEAD OF MOBILE SERVICES
FINANZ INFORMATIK
The Solutions
How They Did It
Ensuring a Stable and Secure Video Communication Environment
After reviewing the requirements, Finanz Informatik chose Absolute Secure Access as a means to create a stable and secure video communication environment for the group’s employees. The solution was implemented together with EBF-EDV Beratung Föllmer GmbH, a solution partner for mobile devices. Finanz Informatik uses the Absolute optimized secure tunnel with Skype for Business on mobile devices to handle large volumes of video, telephony, and messaging communications.
Improving User Experience
Sergej Beilmann, Head of Mobile Services at Finanz Informatik, adds, "In the course of the coronavirus pandemic, we saw a significant increase in usage — yet the performance remained stable. In a very short time, we were easily able to set up 10,000 new mobile users. Thanks to Absolute Secure Access, our users now have good performance even when using poor quality networks."
The Results
Providing Secure Connectivity Without Compromising On Performance
Finanz Informatik has found a reliable partner in Absolute Secure Access. Secure access for Skype for Business via iPhone and iPad is a special and important Finanz Informatik use case because it applies to all Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe users. Beilmann concluded, "As soon as our users start Skype for Business on their iPad or iPhone, Absolute Secure Access runs invisibly in the background."
For the Finanz Informatik team, Absolute Secure Access:
- Provides the high performance and integration needed
- Enables the creation of a stable and secure video communications environment for the group’s employees
- Easily set up 10,000 new mobile users in a short period of time
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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