The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) aims to protect human health and the environment by ensuring that federal laws and policies consider environmental protection and limit risks to human health where people live, learn, and work. Headquartered in Washington, DC, the EPA also has ten regional offices in the United States.
The Story
Improve Asset Management to Ensure Compliance
With about one device (laptop, desktop, or tablet) per employee, the IT department of the EPA is responsible for overseeing software allocation, hardware health, access rights, and agency compliance for a fluctuating number of corporate devices, usually between 1,500 to 2,000.
Using an in-house product for asset management and tracking, the EPA IT team had to conduct software and hardware audits by hand and could not know if they were within or exceeding software license limits without surveying each user individually. This left them at risk of being non-compliant with software vendor contracts. This manual process also presented time-consuming issues with patch management.
Security Challenges
Saves
Money
Protects Data
and Devices
Saves Time
and Reduces Errors
"Absolute offers so many tools we find very valuable. We can now see which software is loaded on a machine to determine if we’re maxing out or underutilizing software licenses. We’ve been able to transfer unused software licenses to users who need them, saving the office or division from buying additional licenses, allowing those monies to be used on other expenditures."
WALTER WILLIAMS
DESKTOP TECHNICAL MANAGER AND INFORMATION SPECIALIST
U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY
The Solutions
How They Did It
Easily Manage, Track, and Secure All Devices
In 2011 they sought a new solution, compared several, and chose Absolute Secure Endpoint. As a government agency, it is essential for the EPA to track, manage, and secure the computers, laptops, and tablets in their deployment—something they can now do easily and cost-effectively with Absolute.
Ensure Data Remains Safe, No Matter Where The Devices Is
“Absolute has provided peace of mind, now that we are allowing more of our data to leave the region more frequently in the hands of our users,” said Walter Williams, Desktop Technical Manager and Information Specialist, EPA. “That’s not saying that mobile devices will not go missing or even get lost from time to time. But that we have measures in place that ensures us that our data will not be compromised. When a device is protected by Absolute Secure Endpoint and has been reported missing, we have the choice of freezing the device remotely or wiping the hard drive; and we have a greater chance of recovery. We rely on Absolute Persistence™ technology to maintain an always-on connection with each device. Even if a perpetrator deletes everything on the hard drive, we know the Absolute Security agent will simply reactivate and reconnect.”
Satisfy Compliance Requirements With Automated Reports
The EPA has often made use of the geolocation features available from Absolute, allowing them to see the location of a device at any point in the workday. Furthermore, end-of-life certificates and software audit reports can be generated instantly to satisfy compliance requirements.
The Results
Improved Asset Management = Time and Money Saved
Through Absolute Secure Endpoint, the EPA has unlocked ways to save time, save money, and become more secure and efficient.
For the EPA team. Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Automates software and hardware audits, now taking minutes versus days, eliminating accidental oversights due to human error
- Allows underutilized software licenses to be redistributed versus buying additional licenses
- Remotely freezes or wipes misplaced laptops to avoid data breaches
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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