Information Anywhere’s Afaria Selected for Comprehensive Frontline Management Capabilities
Colonial’s specific challenge was to find a way to protect the
sensitive data residing on its agents’ 3,500 active laptops located
across the United States without requiring those agents to send their
machines in to the company’s Enrollment Technologies department to be
manually encrypted.
The only way to achieve that objective was to identify and implement a
technology that would allow the Enrollment Technologies department to
secure the laptops remotely, and to manage them on an ongoing basis,
also remotely.
Colonial preferred to implement a single solution to allow it to secure
and manage the laptops rather than a combination of software products,
each of which enabled a particular task or action. This was because the
latter approach would be more costly and complex to administer.
“We found our solution in Afaria from Sybase iAnywhere,” says Sox.
“Afaria’s comprehensive frontline management capabilities enabled us to
efficiently address not only our initial security challenge, but to
centrally manage and automate numerous other IT functions with minimal
action required on the part of our independent agents.”
An added benefit for Colonial was that the company found Afaria to be
flexible enough to support both its online customer enrollment
application as well as its offline enrollment application.
Information Anywhere’s Afaria Enables Remote Hard Drive Encryption and More
Following the selection of Afaria, Colonial began a two-pronged program
to address its security objectives. The first involved educating its
agents so they would better understand the necessity of protecting
customer information. The second involved implementing the Afaria
mobile device management and security software to allow Colonial’s
Enrollment Technologies staff to remotely administer and update the
agents’ laptops – most importantly encrypting their hard drives and
enabling Colonial to disable laptops that are stolen or lost.
The project began with the automated distribution of the device
management and security software client to each agent’s laptop. This
distribution occurred as a background operation when the agents
connected to Colonial’s centralized application server to submit their
business. Once the client was downloaded and installed on the agents’
laptops, Colonial had the ability to perform full hard drive encryption
on their machines. The Afaria solution also allows updates and file
deliveries to be pushed out to the agents’ machines whenever they are
connected to the Internet – even if the users are simply surfing the
Web.
Information Anywhere’s Afaria Contributes to Competitive Edge
“When we introduced our plan to implement a remote management and
security solution on their laptops, we got some resistance from our
independent agents,” recalls Tim Sox. “In the course of educating them
about the importance of providing more protection for sensitive
information, the benefits to them as well as our customers, and the
specifics about the solution, we had an experience with one agent who
was vocal in his resistance to this initiative. Nevertheless, we made
sure his laptop was configured properly and that his hard drive was
fully encrypted.
“Not long after that, following a meeting at a potential account, the
agent called us to share his experience. As he explained, one of the
first few questions the prospect asked him was how Colonial protects
its clients’ information. The agent was surprised, but delighted,
because he had an answer. ‘I’m glad you asked,’ he told the prospect,
‘because we’ve just implemented a comprehensive security solution
including full disc encryption.’ As it turned out, that proved to be a
major factor in his winning the account. Since then, we’ve had many
agents tell us that security has become a regular topic in their sales
conversations and has provided them with a competitive edge.”
Additional Significant Benefits
While this anecdote provides one example of the benefits Colonial has
realized as a result of its implementation of Afaria, there are many
others.
Colonial’s Enrollment Technologies department is able to implement,
monitor and enforce stringent data security policies and update
security and revenue generating software as needed from a central
location using a single console. The combined management and security
solution also allows all tasks to occur during a single connection,
streamlining IT resources.
In addition, there is no need for agents to bring or send their laptops
into the Enrollment Technologies department for updates or fixes.
Rather, thanks to Afaria, these tasks can be performed proactively and
transparently without inconveniencing agents or negatively impacting
their productivity. As Tim Sox comments, “What has been
particularly remarkable is that we’ve been able to secure the data on
3,500 laptops across the country without ever having to physically
touch them. We can manage and administer the whole environment from a
single console. And the fact that we have Afaria in place now gives us
the opportunity as our policies change and evolve to do any number of
management things as needed.”
The corporation as a whole also benefits from improved laptop security
and compliance, thereby providing additional safeguards against
potential financial and legal liability and damage to its
reputation.“Our Afaria-powered remote security and management solution
has significantly strengthened our ability to comply with regulations
governing the handling of sensitive information,” says Sox.
Perhaps most importantly, Colonial’s customers benefit by knowing that
the company is serious about protecting their personal information.
