Access control: Securing open roads in Palm Springs

摘要

For IT departments working for any level of government, enabling se-cure communications between a distributed and constantly changing user base can be a challenge. However, this is critical for maximizing productivity and efficiency and ― perhaps more important ― minimizing costs. Here at the City of Palm Springs, we recently completed an initiative to allow our users ― wherever they are ― access to the applications they need. We were look- ing for a way to maintain our perimeter security as well as open up access to applications. Based on our research, we wanted to explore the area of application security gateways, which allow organizations to maintain their network security while allowing secure access to applications. We evaluated several vendors and, based on certain factors, including application support, product direction, and overall total costs of ownership, we opted for Permeo's Application Security solution. Firstly, our access requirements were diverse ― thatis, we haduserson the inside who needed access to external applications and resources using telnet, FTP, and other messaging applications. We also had remote users who wanted secure access to targeted internal applications that weren't in our DMZ. And we needed to allow connectivity to our wide area network. Our application requirements were equally as diverse. Our remote users wanted full access to native Outlook, we had to support a niche library client/server application called Workflows, and we needed local server access, too. We also had plans to explore using some of the real-time collaborative applications, such as instant messaging, and wanted to make sure that the product we installed now would support those deployments.