Customer Perspectives

As offices emptied out earlier this year in many places around the world as a result of the pandemic, IT teams scrambled to ensure fast, reliable, and secure connectivity to the corporate network for employees. While some organizations were able to leverage existing solutions, others found that their products were incapable of scaling to meet the needs of a mostly remote workforce. This was the case for one business process outsourcing (BPO) firm with 7,000 newly homebound employees, and the question quickly became: What now?

No Time for Trial and Error

Because it had to retool quickly, the BPO company's IT team could not afford to make the wrong technology decision. They started by shortlisting vendors they could trust. At the top of that list was Fortinet, which was recognized as a leading security technology provider by the BPO's global parent company. 

Fortinet proposed the following telework solution:

• A high-capacity secure VPN gateway comprised of a clustered pair of FortiGate enterprise-level next-generation firewalls (NGFWs).
• Secure access and user identity verification with two-factor authentication, using FortiAuthenticator at headquarters and the FortiToken passcode generator.
• FortiAnalyzer analytics and automation, providing visibility into the entire telework footprint and enabling rapid alerting and threat mitigation by IT staff who were also working from home.

During an initial proof-of-concept (PoC) performed in the customers' real environment, Fortinet demonstrated how its solutions and ASIC-based technology were capable of supporting their entire operation to quickly enable secure remote business operations. After seeing these results, this BPO organization chose to implement Fortinet's Teleworker Solutions.

And in the time it took the team to define and approve the project budget, Fortinet supported the company's telework operations with loaner Fortinet devices, so the business could continue unabated.

Fortinet Teleworker Solutions Enable Secure Remote Business Operations

Most of the 7,000 remote workers support the customer-facing operations (such as contact center services) of the company's clients, so trust is essential. Because working from home increased the risk of the corporate network being compromised by password theft, the company opted for two-factor authentication (2FA) for identity verification. To give teleworkers an easy way to comply with 2FA, the company chose FortiToken Mobile, an iOS or Android app that generates and displays the one time password (OTP) on workers' cellphones.

At the company's headquarters, FortiAuthenticator validates the OTP and enforces the identity-driven policies to ensure that remote employees are accessing only their authorized network resources.

Additionally, the FortiGate NGFW that the company chose as its VPN gateway is designed to support up to 100,000 client-to-gateway IPsec VPN tunnels. Two such NGFWs are configured in a high-availability (HA) cluster at the company's headquarters, providing the necessary capacity while ensuring business continuity. 

Fortinet is an Ideal Partner 

Beyond satisfaction with the technology, the IT team also reported feeling very supported throughout the entire transition to telework. The support for teleworker operations while the budget was being approved and Fortinet's keen awareness of the time crunch all helped to promote a successful outcome for the BPO company. As an added benefit, the company found that not only did its security technology costs not increase as a result of the telework initiative, but they actually shrank, due to vendor consolidation. 

Discover how Fortinet Teleworker Solutions enable rapid deployment of secure remote access for remote workforces of all sizes.