Ensure Remote Workers Have the Access They Need to Be Productive

During the early days of COVID-19, as agency after agency began requiring employees to work from home, the challenges of the new reality became crystal clear.

Employees were having problems accessing the information they needed to do their jobs, and were hampered by slow network connections, along with capacity and performance issues. For one defense health agency, those problems required an immediate solution. Without any change, the agency’s day-today business would come to a halt.

The agency had been using VPN concentrators with agents installed on user devices to manage traffic and provide user access, but the concentrators were failing as demand skyrocketed. They needed a better solution — one that could accommodate traffic bursts quickly and scale as high as necessary on-demand.

After evaluating several options, the agency settled on Prisma Access from Palo Alto Networks, a secure access service edge (SASE) solution that provides cloud-based connectivity and security for remote users.

With this solution, users spin up their own network infrastructure on demand, and the infrastructure is always in compliance with the agency’s policies. When users finish using the resources, they spin back down.

Palo Alto Networks provides federal agencies with data protection, network security and cloud security solutions. Its Prisma Access SASE product, based on zero-trust security, provides granular user and application visibility and control, along with content inspection.

Prisma Access addresses many of the TIC 3.0 use cases, including SD-WAN architectures, and integrates with existing trusted internet connection access provider (TICAP) and managed trusted internet protocol service (MTIPS) technology.

Today, as personnel continue to work remotely, the value of the SASE-based solution has become even more clear. No matter how long the pandemic continues or how many employees will continue working remotely in the future, latency, capacity and performance will never again be major issues.

This article is an excerpt from GovLoop’s recent report, “The New Work Reality: Securing Remote Access for the Long Term.” Download the full report here to explore the challenges agencies are facing in accommodating a growing number of remote workers and ways to overcome them.