About secure remote working at Cambridgeshire County Council, the county’s largest employer, provides services such as schools, roads and transport schemes, libraries and care for the most vulnerable in society.
Around half of its budget is spent on the education service and a further quarter on social care. The authority is highly regarded for its innovative approach to e-government and around 80pc of its transactions are already available on-line.
In keeping with its e-government commitment, the council recently began researching a solution for secure remote access – a system that would make it possible for its employees to access all of their critical work applications, files and data from their home PC using a standard Web browser. The council began reviewing SSL (secure sockets layer) VPN (virtual private network) solutions from various vendors.
Rolling out such a secure remote access system would give its employees the function to work flexibly and efficiently, so that they could juggle their workloads with busy home and family lives. This would also help ensure compliance with the Flexible Working Act, a nationwide law that requires employers to provide their staff with reasonable means to work from home when necessary.
The solution
Craig Hyde, implementation analyst for Cambridgeshire, has been instrumental in analysing and finding the right secure remote access solution for the council. After scrutiny of a range of competitive products and running a pilot project for six months, they decided on the Netilla‚ Security Platform from Netilla Networks.
The Netilla Security Platform is a SSL VPN platform that provides access to a range of applications – including both server-based (legacy) applications and the growing number of Web-based applications. Netilla’s V-Realms Client Identity Engine makes it easy, the firm claims, to set up customised authentication and authorization profiles for different types of users within an organisation. For Cambridgeshire County Council, Netilla’s native access to Windows Terminal Services (WTS) meant that it could deliver browser-based remote access to the core set of applications its employees used on a daily basis.
"The main reason for choosing Netilla is that it is an ideal secure black box solution, you configure it and away you go – it’s simple for the users to use and if there are any problems they get resolved quickly," said Hyde.
Cambridgeshire initially ran their pilot with 60 "early adopter" employees, and are now commencing the general roll out to a broader base of users. Out of 3,500 LAN-connected users, it is anticipated Netilla will be used by up to 1,100 users. The only prerequisites for the service are a Key Fob for security and a broadband connection.
Towards the end of the pilot period the Council carried out a questionnaire with 60 of the early adopters to find out whether they wanted to continue with the remote access from Netilla. There was an overwhelming hands-up. Hyde continued – "It is rare to introduce a new solution that doesn’t draw some kind of criticism from some of the staff. "
Access
Secure remote access is now available to a broad range of council employees and councillors, including social workers, HR, accounting personnel, IT and senior management. "It’s never been easier for people to get at their applications remotely using Netilla, we’ve set up a customised Netilla logon page and remote workers immediately get access to the same look and feel as their applications in the office," Hyde said.
For many of the workers, it has given them greater freedom in their jobs and contributed to their work/life balance. Many are now enjoying less frequent journeys to work and can stay at home and work when children are off sick, even catch up on work when they are sick themselves, at weekends or on annual leave.
In one recent case, one member of staff working away in Sweden was delighted to be able to continue working on her accounts as she was able to have access to the financial system, an Oracle back-end application. Whilst waiting in a lobby in Stockholm, she was able to approve four outstanding orders. This helped her keep on top of her work whilst away and also keep the council’s suppliers happy too. In her words: "a fab result and a thumbs up for Netilla".
Other benefits the council report they have found are the cost-savings associated with broadband connection using secure remote access, especially for established home workers. Users can route straight into existing Citrix applications using just their Web browser instead of an ICA client loaded onto their PC. Applications such as Outlook look and work just as they do in the office. The council’s IT department now plans to build a dedicated WTS server to run all support requirements remotely, enabling them to amend accounts, change passwords, manage back-up and restores, and deal with faults or potential problems from any broadband or dial-up location.
The council report they also like the idea that no information except a small Java applet is downloaded onto remote computers. Using a thin client approach allows for all the processing to be done on the WTS server back in the data center. The result is that applications appear to be running on the local computer, but in fact remain safe inside the central office. This "application-layer proxy" approach has security benefits, it is claimed, because it means that there is never a direct data stream from the remote PC straight into the data center.
Remote ease
One of the other key factors that encouraged Cambridgeshire County Council to implement Netilla, it says, was the ease with which it can be issued to additional remote workers; it literally takes just a few minutes to get them up and working. The admin team is able to provide access using Microsoft Active Directory, which means administering via a familiar interface and with minimal training. "This saves on training costs, administration and frees the IT guys to concentrate on other tasks in hand," Hyde said.
Netilla’s largest customer base in the US has traditionally been the healthcare sector, but in the UK, due to ambitious e-government targets to invest in new internet technologies, local government have been Netilla’s leading vertical industry. However, Cambridgeshire County Council over the next couple of months will extend Netilla into the Cambridgeshire office of the National Health Service (NHS) as 900 staff move out of the council to work within the NHS. Staff will move from their council premises to the NHS buildings, which will involve needing access to established Council IT services and therefore sharing applications with the council. As these records will be confidential and sensitive, the council with the NHS have chosen to use a dedicated line, which will not be used across the Internet; however, Netilla will still be used to provide secure remote access between the NHS and the council.
Comments
During the pilot period, Cambridgeshire County Council have fed back a number of comments to Netilla’s headquarters in the US. Hyde said: "We’ve built up a great relationship with Netilla over the year, giving them our thoughts on their product, and they have responded by coming up with a solution to most problems that we may have encountered. For example, last year Netilla didn’t support a generic local printing function, which was a hindrance for home users. Six months later this functionality was incorporated using Adobe Acrobat viewer. In conclusion, we are deploying Netilla throughout the council and look forward to watching it develop with Cambridgeshire NHS, where we believe it will pick up momentum very quickly. It’s a great product that works well out of the box, it’s quick, easy to use, administer and maintain, it does what we need it to do – provide secure, quick and simple remote access from anywhere, anytime."
About Cambridgeshire County Council
With 14,000 staff Cambridgeshire County Council is the largest employer in the county with a £466m annual budget. For more information, visit http://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/
About Netilla Networks
Netilla Networks, Inc provides secure application access solutions. For more information, visit
