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Managing Thousands of users in Hundreds of branches with a few clicks

We live in a global business world. Almost on a daily basis, we see organizations expanding rapidly across geographies. While businesses in every industry can have international sites, some verticals like banking, finance, education, and retail are more apt to have corporate offices in multiple locales. Companies are typically in Tier 1/metropolitan cities with over 1,000 users, medium branches are in Tier 2 cities with 500-1000 users, Tiers 3 and 4 city users span from 100-500 users, and Tier 5 city branches are typically in small towns and remote areas with 10-100 users.

While companies need to provide internet connectivity to these users, they also need to make sure their internet bandwidth and employee time is used for business purposes. At the same time, some companies need to provide guest wifi access to visitors or customers. Many times, the company providing internet access to internal users and wifi access to external users wants to ensure that users are not browsing certain categories on their network, including sites containing thing like weapons, pornography, or hate. These, and other such categories that are not aligned with the organization’s business are not deemed an acceptable use of the company’s resources. 

Implementing a solution that can take care of this critical requirement may be time consuming and costly with a traditional hardware-based solution approach. On top of that, solution maintenance in each and every location is a humongous task involving IT admins placed strategically across various branches. These admins also need to have expertise in managing the solution. Additionally, it is best practice to inventory all components delivered to each location by noting which items are gone for maintenance, in transit, or deployed in production. Unfortunately, this seems so complicated that a lot of organizations have left this area unattended.

There is another way to provide internet access to remote location branches and users. This can be done by using MPLS connection from all the branches to a central datacenter. Bandwidth utilization, dependency and load on corporate datacenters in such setups is huge. Plus, organizations continuously scale up these solutions as their branches and user base grows.

All of these thousands of users can be managed by a few clicks and minimal time using Akamai’s cloud security solutions. Akamai’s Secure Internet Gateway solution, Enterprise Threat Protector (ETP), starts with recursive DNS protection and becomes the first layer of protection when users of any organization wants to connect to the internet. Remote location users can be given Secure Internet Access without having  to manage hardware in each and every location.

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Also, companies can utilize ETP to allow or block Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) Categories in accordance with company policies, and business and user requirements. With this tool organizations, especially educational institutes, can enable SafeSearch and YouTube Restricted Mode for students/users to provide limited access to video content.

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These measures help companies keep systems secure and improve resource utilization. Even users on the go can enjoy protected systems, on or off the corporate network. All this can be achieved with a few clicks and minimal administration.

Learn more about Enterprise Threat Protector, or read this use case about enforcing an acceptable use policy for more information.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Akamai Blog authored by Ashish Singh. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAkamaiBlog/~3/Lp2OFeDFsBw/managing-thousands-of-users-in-hundreds-of-branches-with-a-few-clicks.html