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Defender Emergency Support Package

With the advent of recent natural and man made disasters such as hurricane Katrina, terrorism, the Asian quake-tsunami in 2004, not to mention the increasing threats of pandemics like H5N1 bird-flu, governments have reacted through agencies such as FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a US government agency tasked with Disaster Mitigation, Preparedness, Response & Recovery planning, which together with Homeland Security work to build a unified set of effective capabilities to manage the risk to the people in the USA.

PassGo Technologies recognizes the significance of threats such as these and their consequences and impact to life, property and commerce, and the beneficial use of technology to assist in mitigation of their impact on business. With an ever increasing pressure on businesses to adapt to, and plan for such eventualities, products such as Defender, UNIX Privilege Manager (UPM) and Webthority provide an overall security infrastructure and represent the backbone of their business continuity planning.

As an example, a significant issue can be staff absenteeism, which under disaster situations can increase significantly. This may not necessarily be due to inability to ‘operate’, but potentially due to inoperative infrastructure, quarantine zones or even fear. With a significant proportion of staff absent, many businesses can be at best hampered and at worst severely crippled. PassGo has for some time been assisting business with securing home workers access via VPNs (see Defender Homeworking and VPNs ) by providing the security infrastructure and strong authentication necessary to make working from home a safe and viable option.

The Defender Emergency Support Package is designed to take the ‘Home Working’ concept a stage further, by significantly extending the number of users falling into the Home Working category under disaster circumstances, at a significantly reduced cost. In essence it is analogous to an insurance policy which extends your Defender license to encompass a significantly increased user population under disaster situations, and provides a mechanism to deliver low cost one-time-passwords to this extended user populous.

Consider a business with 1000 office based staff. A percentage of these, say 50, will be required as part of their normal role to have access via VPN, however, in the event of a disaster it may prove beneficial to be able to permit 600+ staff have access to work from home for a period of time.

With the Defender Emergency Support Package, this is made possible by extending the number of licensed Defender users to the 600+ level, but with only 50 routinely authenticating through Defender. Each of the remaining 550 users will be registered with Defender, and be required during registration to provide sufficient information to authenticate themselves in the event of a disaster. Each of these users will be assigned a special DESP token type and required to set a PIN.

In the event of a disaster, in accordance with the company’s BCP documentation, designated users will be able to access a secure website to authenticate themselves, triggering the transmission of a one-time-password via email or SMS to the registered users address/phone number. This OTP, combined with the user’s PIN will provide the credentials necessary to obtain access to their corporate network via their VPN.

For more information contact sales@passgo.com