Four Communications Group (Four) is one of the leading integrated marketing companies in the UK and Middle East. Their key services include advertising, creative, branding, PR, public affairs, behavior change, media planning, media buying, marketing, performance, social analytics, content, Web, digital marketing, video and animation, SEO, events, crisis management, CSR, sponsorship, partnerships, and training.
The Story
The Need to Improve the Remote Work Environment
After struggling with poor user experience and an unreliable SSL VPN solution, Four was in desperate need to improve remote working for its employees. The sudden onset of COVID-19-related office closures made this a company-wide issue and top priority. Four needed a tool to enhance people’s access to company systems and, most importantly, something that could cope with a variety of home Internet connections. With both Mac and Windows users needing access to large creative files, they also needed a cross-platform solution that would provide the same quality connectivity and functionality to all users, regardless of the operating system.
Security Needs
Secure
Remote Access
Decrease IT
Support Tickets
Eliminate
Dropped Connections
"Absolute Secure Access just makes that whole experience for the IT side of things much smoother, because the tunnel allows that management and communication that otherwise wasn’t possible with the solutions we had before. "
JAKE FRASER
IT AND OPERATIONS DIRECTOR,
FOUR COMMUNICATIONS GROUP
The Solutions
How They Did It
Reliable Connectivity for the Anywhere Workforce
After an evaluation, Four was ready to resolve their remote working issues and deploy Absolute Secure Access across the company. As a result, employees now have access to all corporate resources without relying on multiple supplemental tools and technologies, giving users a full ‘office-like’ experience at home.
Improving IT Efficiencies
IT also streamlined Four’s tech support process using Absolute Secure Access policy controls after ISPs blocked their existing remote support tool. Prior to Absolute Secure Access, support had to ask each user to set up a hotspot on their smartphone to provide a connection. Now, an Absolute Secure Access policy allows the support tool to connect directly without any ISP issues, and their overall mean time to resolution is faster than ever.
The Results
Providing a Uniform Remote Experience for All End Users
Four successfully pivoted its global business by supporting a forward-thinking ‘work-from-anywhere’ policy for employees. The company achieved this change by integrating Absolute Secure Access and designing a device security roadmap that relies on additional Absolute Secure Access capabilities.
To date, Absolute Secure Access:
- Empowers Four’s unique hybrid work environment, resulting in a reduction of office space costs
- Quickly and seamlessly improves user experience and connectivity issues for all end users
- Provides a uniform remote experience for users of both macOS and Windows devices
- Virtually eliminates dropped connections and glitches, even under poor network conditions
- Decreases connection-related support calls and trouble tickets to IT
- Allows Four’s lean IT team to focus on value-add projects by Absolute Secure Access being easy to deploy, maintain, and support across seven global offices
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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