Yorkshire Water is a water supply and treatment utility company, serving the Yorkshire county in Northern England.
The Story
The Need For Improved Mobile Connectivity
Yorkshire Water’s 1,800 field technicians respond to water delivery and quality issues such as water discoloration and burst pipes. The technicians responsible for this region of over five million residents rely on mobile connectivity to access schedules, maps, pipe location data, telemetry feeds, and more. Rather than helping this mobile workforce, the utility’s legacy VPN of 15 years offered no troubleshooting tools and provided no visibility into whether issues originated on a device, the network, the software, the modem, or the SIM card. The organization needed a new solution, but management also demanded that the transition avoided disrupting business.
Security Needs
Powerful Visibility
and Improved
Diagnostics
Seamless User
Experience
Enhanced Business
Continuity
"The diagnostic tools are particularly strong. It gives us a coverage map, by device, by 2G/3G/4G, and a view of connectivity across the whole area."
DARREN METCALFE
INFRASTRUCTURE CLIENTS MANAGER
YORKSHIRE WATER
The Solutions
How They Did It
Providing Seamless Connectivity for Remote Workers
Ultimately, Yorkshire’s transition from the previous VPN to Absolute Secure Access incurred no negative impact. Tech support now has full visibility into its devices, coverage areas, and user engagement. The IT team finds the system easy to maintain and patch and appreciates the system’s resiliency and capacity for expansion. Most importantly, the field technicians and business users now have uninterrupted, seamless connections with a single login, whether they’re using third-party Wi-Fi, 4G, or at home.
Improving Troubleshooting and Support With Enhanced Visibility
With full visibility into devices, network traffic, and coverage areas, the support team is able to handle all front-line resolutions. They use Absolute Secure Access tools to track technicians’ locations and monitor device health. The system offers a full inventory of devices, providing modem and firmware information.
The Results
Ensuring Business Continuity While Improving User Experience
Absolute Secure Access delivers powerful visibility so support teams can zero in on the root cause of connectivity issues and solve them rapidly. With a single login across any network, the user experience is seamless. After initially deploying with 2,600 licenses to its field technicians, Yorkshire Water now has 10,000 licenses deployed across all employees at the utility, further ensuring business continuity.
For the Yorkshire Water team, Absolute Secure Access:
- Improves diagnostics and visibility for faster troubleshooting
- Deploys seamlessly with no impact on business
- Enhances user experience with seamless support for home and third-party Wi-Fi networks
- Provides resiliency and failover for the system between Yorkshire water data centers
- Enhances business continuity throughout all departments
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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