CenSus, a partnership between Adur and Worthing Councils, Horsham and Mid Sussex district councils, is progressively deploying software on a site by site basis to staff who have a requirement to work from home, and newly elected councillors who require secure access to the council’s IT. G/On from the Danish company Excitor gives council workers secure remote access to systems, including Citrix, remote desktops, web mail and other web-based applications from personally-owned devices, without the overhead of a VPN (virtual private network) or other network infrastructure products. The softwar firm points to this enabling the public sector to comply with the 2014 EU directive on flexible working. Users are issued with a G/On bootable USB token with which they authenticate themselves for access to council systems from any computer. This means a reduced requirement to procure and support council devices such as laptops. No data leaves the network and no data or applications can be stored on the remote machine. The product supports Windows and Mac laptops or desktops with built-in strong two factor authentication (2FA). Users can carry a USB stick instead of both a company laptop and a 2FA token. John Ross, Head of ICT for CenSus says: “CenSus required a PSN compliant solution for remote access and home working that had been evaluated by CESG, was quick to deploy, simple to administer and enabled access to a wide range of IT systems including Remote Desktop, Citrix servers and web applications. During a one month trial, we provided tokens to a number of managers across all sites with varying work patterns, all found G/On reliable and extremely simple to use. The ease of the G/On deployment was demonstrated at Mid Sussex Council, where it took just three days to go from raising an order to successfully deploying the solution to 54 elected members. There is considerable cost associated with providing company managed devices with VPN gateways, antivirus, anti-malware software, certificate servers, token authentication servers, intrusion detection systems and the rest. G/On removes the need for that significant infrastructure complexity and cost.”
The deployment of Excitor G/On has been supported through the new reseller channel partnership of Excitor and Armadillo Managed Services.
Mark Newns, CEO Armadillo Managed Services, said: “When we first saw G/On we were impressed with how easy it is to use and deploy and how it reduces the cost and complexity for organisations that wish to deploy a flexible home working solution for their employees.”
John Ross adds: “CenSus ICT staff found it very easy to work with Armadillo to test and deploy the G/On solution, not only were their consultants knowledgeable, but they were able to quickly resolve any issues, working closely with Excitor. The whole process from initial discussions to test and implementation went very smoothly and was managed very well. Armadillo Managed Services worked very closely with CenSus to understand each of the council’s environments and use cases, ensuring each deployment was in-line with their specific success criteria.”
In addition to G/On, Mid Sussex Council has also selected Excitor DME to enable secure access to corporate email, PIM, documents and intranet from a range of mobile devices.
About the IT firm
Excitor is the Danish company behind DME (Dynamic Mobile Exchange), software for employee access to e-mail, calendar and corporate data via their mobile phones, smartphones or PDAs.
