Remote Working
Mobile working isn’t unusual for most institutions, as many of them enable staff to work from home as and when required and students to access resources wherever they are. However in the event of a natural disaster such as a pandemic, institutions need to have the facility to enable remote working for all users in order to continue to run their organisation. This then creates a number of challenges:
- Capacity – Are the current remote working solutions capable to burst to significantly large numbers of users.
- Cost – Do they have the required budget to invest in licences, software or hardware needed to cope and scale.
- Time – If they do have the budget, how quickly can they purchase if investments hit procurement thresholds.
- Access – If hardware and people are needed onsite, how can solutions be installed if the campus is closed.
Due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, this has highlighted the urgency and need for strategic planning that enables complete workforces to work away from the office. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) have also released their “Home working – Preparing your organisation and staff” guidance in-light of the pandemic.
Remote working solutions are not new, however ones that can cope with unpredictable surges in usage are often hard to find without significant investments in hardware upgrades and licence increases.
Our approach either utilises existing investments in Palo Alto Networks solutions or for those who do not use the technology, small investments in hardware, licences or cloud managed services:
- GlobalProtect – Leverage the VPN capabilities of existing Palo Alto Networks investments – with no cost implications.
- GlobalProtect Next-Gen Firewalls – Invest in high performance low cost appliances that can scale to huge amounts of concurrent users – without significant investment.
- Virtual Next-Gen Firewalls – No hardware or onsite presence needed, we can spin up these virtual remote working solutions in hours, enabling fast deployment that can support large remote user numbers.
- Prisma Access – A cloud mobile access solution (secure access service edge – SASE) for branch offices and users.
Our solutions enables institutions to provide an enhanced, flexible and self-managed remote working solution with all of the required security needed and without worrying about scalability, performance and large unforeseen costs. The benefits include:
- Cope with huge unforeseen demands in remote working requirements.
- No or very little training needed to implement, as its utilising the existing Next-Gen Firewall capabilities
- Fully managed cloud service removes the time and effort needed by the IT to setup, test and implement remote working initiatives
- Costs – none (for existing customers) or low if a customer doesn’t have a suitable VPN platform.
- Enhanced Security including advanced threat prevention, web filtering, sandboxing, DNS security, credential theft prevention, DLP and next-generation firewall policies based on user-to-application and host information profile.
In the event of an incident that requires mobile working for the entire workforce, our offering scales, can be deployed quickly (with no onsite engineers required) and provides a stable long-term remote working platform.