Local Government Technology Solutions
Technology is currently being adopted in government offices around the country to provide different channels of communication including both web and telephony, which need to be securely provisioned. The use of technology and especially incorporating new technologies in local councils and government offices can be key enablers for transforming both the delivery and improvement of services with the added benefit of efficiency savings.
There is also a growing need for most organisations to provide mobile and remote working arrangements. There is also the constant need to store an increasing amount of private and confidential information in a secure environment that is also highly scalable to meet future requirements.
As with any organisation in any industry, the real benefits of any solution are only delivered when sufficient engagement has taken place between the solution supplier and organisation.
The challenges faced within councils and government buildings can be addressed, but to do so requires great communication and a lot of time and effort invested into the project to make it work efficiently and effectively and to ensure the maximum benefits are achieved. Net-Ctrl has this experience in the industry, we have worked with many types of council of all sizes and have delivered technology solutions that changed and improved the way they work.
Net-Ctrl Security Solutions for Local Governments
Delivering Multi-Factor Authentication with Thales
Local government in the UK is facing a perfect storm of spending cuts and pressure to improve the delivery of services. Remote working by council employees can help to deal with both of these imperatives, but providing a reliable security solution for remote access to council networks is in itself a significant expense, both in terms of the equipment needed and the staff time required to manage it.
Effective security is critical to the way UK local authorities govern and conduct their day to day public business. Moreover, security plays a vital role in shaping public confidence and helps provide efficient, effective and secure public services
One of the many challenges that UK local authorities face is the proper implementation of systems or services to prevent unauthorised access and modification, or misuse by authorised users. Whether it’s providing connection into the Government Secure Intranet (GSI) via GCSX, remote employee working or securing web applications and services – strong authentication controls are crucial in managing risk.
Thales’s data-centric security solutions have enabled our customers to adapt to the escalating internal and external threats to their high-value data, and rapidly evolve to address new business requirements and compliance mandates. Our products deliver persistent protection of sensitive data throughout the information lifecycle by:
- Protecting identities of users and applications
- Securing transactions of critical, high-performance digital processes
- Encrypting data as it is created accessed, shared, stored, and moved
- Protecting the encryption keys enterprises rely on to ensure encrypted data remains secure
- Enabling cloud-based infrastructures through protection and control of data in virtual
- environments
The Thales security portfolio is extensive. Net-Ctrl has specialised in a few key areas Identity Access Management, Authentication and Hardware Safety Module solutions.
Delivering SD-WAN with Fortinet
What is SD-WAN?
Software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) solutions transform an organization’s capabilities by leveraging the corporate wide-area network (WAN) as well as multi-cloud connectivity to deliver high-speed application performance at the WAN edge of branch sites. One of the chief benefits of SD-WAN is that it provides a dynamic path selection among connectivity options—MPLS, 4G/5G, or broadband—ensuring organizations can quickly and easily access business-critical cloud applications.
SD-WAN solutions have become increasingly popular as organizations request fast, scalable, and flexible connectivity among different network environments, and seek to lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) while preserving user experience. But the wrong SD-WAN solution can significantly inhibit an organization’s ability to quickly adapt to changing business demands, not least because it creates new security headaches.
SD-WAN Explained
Improve user experience and simplify operations at the WAN Edge with an integrated NGFW and SD-WAN in single offering.
Why SD-WAN? Benefits and Advantages
According to researcher IDC, the SD-WAN market will continue growing at a more than 30% rate over the next few years, approaching $5.3 billion in 2023. Many organizations are embracing SD-WAN solutions for a number of key benefits, including the following.
Improved User Experience: The underlying technology in SD-WAN allows remote sites to connect more easily to networks, with lower latency, better performance, and more reliable connectivity. In the era when users demand a lot more of their applications and infrastructure at unprecedented speed and scale, an appealing user experience can be a make-or-break.
Lower TCO: MPLS and other connectivity technologies aren’t just outdated, they’re also more expensive when the total cost of ownership (TCO) is considered. SD-WAN significantly reduces bandwidth costs, and when it can offer benefits such as zero-touch provisioning, better automates certain processes and cuts down on the amont of hardware and manual management required for success.
Simplicity: As network infrastructures have evolved, the sprawl of point products used for networking and security can make things pretty complicated. SD-WAN uses automation and other benefits to make connectivity a simpler process across mixed environments, including on-premises, hybrid, and cloud.
Multi-cloud Readiness: With more than 90% of enterprises today investing in a multi-cloud strategy, the right SD-WAN solution makes that environment easier to manage. Multi-cloud is not the same as hybrid cloud, in which public and private clouds are integrated to optimize performance, security and flexibility. Multi-cloud simply means that organizations have the flexibility to select the best cloud provider for each of their various infrastructure and application needs. Because of its automation capabilities and also where it resides strategically in the network, SD-WAN has become the solution of choice for rapidly evolving cloud network innovations (including multi-cloud).
Better Security Overall: An SD-WAN solution needs to have integrated security; otherwise, it’s just another connectivity option that unfortunately becomes an attack vector. When properly implemented, secure SD-WAN improves the security of the business overall.
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Delivering Networks and Network Security with Juniper Networks
Juniper Networks offers a trusted network infrastructure that helps government organisations around the globe meet growing demands for network services and applications requiring high-performance, high-reliability network environments.
These solutions cost-effectively maximise government IT network infrastructures by:
- Helping to consolidate and deliver vital information and services internally and externally for government organisations, and delivering these services to millions of workers and citizens dispersed throughout the world, even during critical events like combat, humanitarian efforts, terrorist threats, or other situations that threaten business continuity.
- Ensuring the protection of highly sensitive assets such as National security information, while allowing controlled, authenticated network access to organisations and departments spread across geographic distances, allowing them to collaborate in real-time, in a secure government network infrastructure.
- Delivering IT departments the ability to implement operational improvements and cost reductions associated with major campaigns like data centre consolidation, green initiatives, and teleworking, by reducing administrative, training and troubleshooting costs.
Juniper Networks offers a high-performance network infrastructure that enables organisations to deploy government networks that are open, scalable, simple, secure, and automated. Juniper’s expansive portfolio includes software, silicon, and systems for state-of-the-art routing, switching, and security, across public and private sector markets worldwide.
Net-Ctrl are experts in supplying switching, SSL VPN, unified access control, and integrated management that will provide a simple and secure network, available all the time
Juniper provides fast, reliable, and secure access to vital, mission-critical applications and services over a single network, at scale. The world’s top 130 service providers, 99 of the Fortune 100, and hundreds of central/federal, state/local government agencies, and other public sector organisations around the world, are among the many demanding organisations that rely on Juniper Networks to quickly meet their high-performance networking requirements. For these customers, Juniper’s New Network is now a strategic platform, essential to their mission.
Delivering Next-Generation Firewalls with Palo Alto Networks
The unabated rise of cyberthreats targeting governments and critical infrastructure has made protecting networks and information systems a strategic priority for governments worldwide. Adopting new applications and innovative technologies to remain competitive is a must, but they bring new vulnerabilities and add complexity and new challenges to your network security.
Palo Alto Networks’ security platform was built from the ground-up to address the new emerging cybersecurity landscape. Their innovative approach to network security gives you full visibility into application traffic, users, and content, and increases your ability to prevent cyberthreats.
Strengthen, yet simplify, your network security.
The Internet, enterprise applications, threats, and network security all evolved rapidly together. Today, you might be managing a portfolio of security tools fragmented across traditional firewalls, IPS, threat detection, and URL filtering. By integrating all security functionality into the core of their next-generation firewall, Palo Alto Networks simplifies and strengthens your network security.
Enable the safe use of new applications and technologies.
Just like private companies, governments want to adopt innovative technologies and applications that can make them more efficient, such as social networking, mobile computing, VoIP, or Virtualisation. Palo Alto Networks’ security platform allows you to define and enforce application usage policies at a granular level, whilst retaining your ability to closely inspect all traffic for threats.
Get granular control based on application, user, and content.
User populations in governments are often diverse – ranging from contractors to civilian employees and other government departments – each with a different level of security clearance. With Palo Alto Networks, you can segment and dynamically control network zones, systems, databases, and applications based on users, user groups, and their roles, and apply the appropriate level of security to applications whilst safely enabling access where needed.
Gain full visibility and deploy efficient defenses against cyberthreats.
Cyberattacks are now more sophisticated and more frequent. Security teams that rely on fragmented or legacy tools are unable to systematically follow-up on suspicious traffic. The Palo Alto next-generation firewalls provide immediate visibility and control over modern threats and APTs, and give your teams enough information to take action.
Why Use
Net-Ctrl
Net–Ctrl is a leading UK value-add technology reseller. Our mission is to provide technology solutions and services that enable our customers to exist safely and efficiently in a complex digital world.
We always take a consultative approach to business. Our role is to find what is important to your organisation, to advise you on best practice and to find products and services that meet your demands. We understand that each of our customers is unique so finding the right balance of cost, functionality and performance is key to our recommendations and your final choice.
We have been operating for over 15 years and developed expertise in network security and infrastructure, wireless, IP-CCTV and building access control solutions. We have handpicked a wide product range with respected companies offering innovative and sophisticated technologies that we believe truly deliver in the workplace
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