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 using the SSL VPN platform to mobilize its workforce. The new platform is developed by Aventail, a company specialized on remote access.

    Jo Watts, Principal Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Security Officer, Wolverhampton City Council, stated: "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,"

The City of Wolverhampton is the 13th largest city in England, dating back to a 10th Century Saxon monastery. It is the largest urban area in the West Midlands after Birmingham, and home to one of the UK's largest universities. They offer local government services to the city's current population of approximately 250,000. ICT looked for a way trough which the Council's workforce to become mobile. The solution is the 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. Adventail had to assure 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.

    ICT selected Aventail after researching over 20 SSL VPN solutions including F5, Whale and Portwise.The new product was installed with only minimal training required. The SSL VPN provided an end-to-end, layered security approach revealing all managed and unmanaged end point devices, using best-of-breed device interrogation and granular data safety across Windows, Windows Mobile, Linux, and Macintosh platforms.

    They have secure network access from home, get e-mails on the move on PDAs, and can access their e-mail from virtually any PC. People are able to access applications such as Outlook Web Access, the intranet and needed network applications. ICT was able to establish different levels of authentication and defined different access control rules based on a user's ID. For example, a employee 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 due to the fact that he was using an unmanaged device.

Watts added: "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."

For more information visit www.aventail.com.