Aventail SSL VPN provides secure remote access to Wolverhampton City Council

(16/04/2007)

The Wolverhampton City Council provides local government services to the city’s current population of approximately 250,000. For the Council’s workforce to become mobile, ICT looked for a solution that could provide remote access from multiple end-point device types and operating systems, remote access to multiple application resources and platforms, and control of managed and unmanaged end point environments with robust availability.

The solution had to ensure that end point devices were free of malware before allowing users to connect to the city’s network—and all remote users had to have different levels of authentication depending on both the device and the access to network resources required.

Aventail has announced that the Wolverhampton City Council has selected and deployed Aventail’s SSL VPN platform to mobilize its workforce. City Councilors, employees and third party support personnel will have secure remote access to the applications and information they need via desktop, laptop, kiosk or mobile device.

After researching over 20 SSL VPN solutions, ICT selected Aventail. In less than a day, they installed Aventail with only minimal training required. Aventail’s SSL VPN provided an end-to-end, layered security approach identifying all managed and unmanaged end point devices, using best-of-breed device interrogation and granular data protection across Windows, Windows Mobile, Linux, and Macintosh platforms.

Now users have full, secure network access from home, get e-mails on the move on PDAs, and can access their e-mail from virtually any PC. They are able to access applications such as Outlook Web Access, the intranet and needed network applications. In providing access, ICT was able to establish different levels of authentication and defined different access control rules based on a user’s ID. For example, a member of the Councilor group using an ICT-managed laptop was able to have full network access and a true “in-office experience” while a member of a partners group using third-party PC had more restrictive access control because he was using an unmanaged device.

“The Aventail solution has enabled our fast growing mobile workforce to have the access they require, when they require it, with the right security levels,” said Jo Watts, Principal Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Security Officer, Wolverhampton City Council. “Aventail’s user-friendly interface has been great for our end users and the control it gives us over access has immediately increased our ability to secure our network infrastructure.”

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