Harbottle & Lewis is a London, UK-based law firm serving media, entertainment, and technology clients for over 60 years. With over 200 employees, their IT strategy needs to support a remote work structure to ensure secure access and reliable connectivity for employees, regardless of where they are.
The Story
Guarantee Secure Remote Access for a Distributed Workforce
What was once a traditional, office-based environment quickly changed for Harbottle & Lewis in 2020, when workers needed to work remotely for the foreseeable future; the company went from one communal office space to 200 remote offices in days.
After undertaking a transformation to the cloud, the organization needed to focus on the end user experience of employees. Its legacy VPN client solution was unreliable. Users needed to manually connect and oftentimes didn’t realize they weren’t connected, resulting in decreased productivity and in some cases, lost billable hours.
Network visibility was also an issue for Harbottle & Lewis’ IT team. After pivoting to a remote work structure, many workers experienced network connectivity issues, but the legacy IT approach didn’t have the level of visibility and insight required to adequately diagnose network issues outside their corporate network.
Security Needs
Secure
Remote Access
Reliable
Connectivity
Improved
Experience
We had zero visibility – we went from one office to 200 remote worker offices. We knew Absolute Secure Access could give us the visibility we needed to improve the remote work experience and provide better support.
CHARLIE LAING
HEAD OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
HARBOTTLE & LEWIS
The Solutions
How They Did It
Ensuring a Reliable and Resilient Connection
Absolute Secure Access was introduced by Appurity, Harbottle & Lewis’ valued technology partner. Appurity knew the capabilities of the solution; it could assure a reliable and resilient connection, provide visibility into various networks, and overall improve the experience for remote workers. After a successful pilot of Absolute Secure Access, Harbottle & Lewis decided to move forward to replace their traditional VPN solution with Absolute’s solution. The decision was also influenced by the level of support Absolute could provide for a smaller law firm.
Improving User Experience
Once implemented, Harbottle & Lewis was able to gain the visibility needed to adequately troubleshoot and diagnose remote workforce issues, including poor connectivity. This improved the overall experience for remote workers, who could carry on without worrying about being disconnected from the network.
The Results
Fewer Support Calls = Increased Productivity
Now that the “work-from-anywhere” concept appears to be here to stay, many law firms are looking to optimize their IT strategy to support and protect their remote workers. With Absolute Secure Access organizations can ensure reliable, resilient network access for their anywhere workforce while actively improving the end user experience.
For Harbottle & Lewis, Absolute Secure Access:
- Reduced connection-related support calls and trouble tickets to IT, resulting in fewer lost hours for IT teams and end users
- Provides a robust remote work solution that can support ever-changing environments and transformations to the cloud
- Provides secure connections on every network, no matter where the end user is located, allowing a secure, optimized experience
- Improves network visibility, allowing IT to proactively troubleshoot, diagnose, and resolve remote working issues with various reports
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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