Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service (DWFRS) operates 50 fire stations serving local communities in the counties of Dorset and Wiltshire, England. Crews from the stations respond to emergency calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week. To protect local communities, DWFRS often works with partners to reduce fire risks wherever possible. Firefighters use Panasonic Toughbooks™ for vital communication and secure mobile access to critical and sensitive information during incident response and community safety activities.
The Story
Guarantee Device and Data Security
As part of its digital transformation, DWFRS needed to ensure that mobile crews had fast, reliable access to communications, while providing IT administrators the ability to guarantee device and data security.
After deploying Absolute, DWFRS frontline crews enjoy a better user experience with constant, secure connectivity on self-healing devices that can easily be managed by IT teams.
Security Challenges
Secure
Remote Access
Sensitive
Data Protection
Device
Fleet Control
"My primary job is to give emergency crews access to critical information wherever and whenever needed so they can focus on saving lives and protecting our community. With Absolute Secure Endpoint and Absolute Secure Access, we’re able to take advantage of endpoint resilience in addition to having secure network access."
DANIEL GREW
MOBILE DATA TECHNOLOGY MANAGER
DORSET & WILTSHIRE FIRE
AND RESCUE SERVICE
The Solutions
How They Did It
Ensuring Information and Application Availability
Seamless, persistent connectivity significantly reduces mobile-related IT issues and is the foundation of modern digital public safety organizations, enabling frontline workers to focus on saving lives rather than troubleshooting technical issues.
Absolute Secure Access provides fire crews with resilient and seamless data connectivity whenever they are called out to an emergency. The software constantly monitors connections, devices, applications and networks to safeguard availability. It also keeps mobile users productive by providing diagnostic tools that rapidly isolate and fix any connectivity issues.
Safeguarding Devices and Data
DWFRS leverages freeze, data wipe and geolocation capabilities to securely control at-risk devices, selectively delete data and complete end-of-life compliance requirements and ensure complete visibility of where those devices are at all times.
A return on investment in software expenditure is also expected to be realized over time with this increased visibility on application usage.
Daniel Grew, Mobile Data Technology Manager at DWFRS explains: “The real difference for me is that Absolute’s Persistence™ technology cannot be uninstalled. If a device is lost and someone tries to wipe the operating system and install a new one, Absolute reinstalls itself. I can track and freeze every device no matter what happens to it,” said Daniel.
Managing Devices With Confidence
All British Emergency Services are undergoing a digital transformation and will soon move to a 4G critical communications bearer, which will allow them to harness fast, safe and secure data throughout England, Scotland, and Wales on any Emergency Services Network device.
The Results
Time Saved = Lives Saved
Ensuring seamless, persistent connectivity is foundational to modern digital public safety organizations. For DWFRS, that means significantly reducing IT issues and, more importantly, freeing frontline workers from troubleshooting so they can focus on saving lives.
For the DWFRS team, Absolute:
- Provides freeze, data wipe, and geolocation capabilities to security control at-risk devices
- Allows complete visibility of where devices are at all times Ensures fire crews are seamlessly connected whenever they are called out to an emergency Guarantees device and data security
- Improves user experience for frontline crews
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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