Modern virtual private network provides resilience and flexibility

Managed Comms has spent many years advocating cutting-edge technologies and Newcastle City Council is the latest organisation to discover the very real advantages offered by a modern UK VPN.

For the last few years, the council has been keeping its staff in the loop courtesy of a basic virtual private network.

As Managed Comms customers will no doubt be aware, a UK VPN allows organisations to send documents and data over a secure connection to other users – even those working from home or in different offices.

Over at Newcastle City Council, ICT technical consultant Andrew Price was keen to stress that the original UK VPN had “done us proud”.

But while the original setup caused no problems over the years, it eventually became apparent that a new solution was required.

“We were keen to meet the compliance requirements set down by the government and to gain some additional benefits,” he explained.

After upgrading to a new virtual private network, the council enjoyed a range of positive outcomes including better resilience, greater flexibility and the option of having almost unlimited simultaneous users.

Mr Price also revealed that the implementation of the new UK VPN was very straightforward.

“The projects carried out to date have been relatively painless and cost-effective,” he said.

“We have been able to rely on the systems once implemented and have pretty much left them untouched.”

Important to give homeworkers a desktop IT strategy

Switching to a managed VPN has many advantages for office IT professionals, not the least of which is the ability to greatly expand the scope for remote working.

Employees can send documents to the office and receive instructions from their superiors even when they’re on the train back from a meeting or stranded at home because of car troubles.

And if the IT department has opted for a managed VPN solution, they don’t even need to worry about installation and ongoing maintenance; a leading UK provider like Managed Comms can take care of all that on your behalf.

Best of all, our managed VPN services are completely secure and you can be confident that information sent from one user will get to the other without going astray or being intercepted by hackers.

But while we provide a truly holistic end-to-end service, there are still some things that IT departments can think about themselves in order to help improve security.

Writing on The Register, Jon Collins of communications industry analysts Freeform Dynamics, argued that a desktop IT strategy is a must whether your business has rows of computer terminals or an ultra-liberal home-working policy.

“In both cases, some fundamentals need to be observed, which it may be best to enshrine in a short, sweet, enforceable and accepted policy – covering areas such as where data lives, how backups are done, what level of security protection is necessary as a minimum and so on,” he said.

After all, although a company can get the most secure managed VPN around at Managed Comms, it’s still necessary to warn employees against sending confidential data through unsecure connections at home.