Materials Solutions
Nasstar delivers additional security for users outside the client's network
Materials Solutions is the largest and most complete metals Additive Manufacturing facility commercially available. The company has over 10 years of experience with a speciality in manufacturing turbomachinery parts where quality is essential to ensure operational performance and employs a world-class team of metallurgists and engineers.
Services
Two-Factor Authentication
The Brief
Materials Solutions encourage flexible working and offer Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) across the business, having already deployed Citrix virtualisation technology to support this policy. Whilst this enabled users to select from a multitude of cross-platform devices and work from a variety of locations, the company wanted to ensure tighter levels of security for devices accessing their system from outside the network. Materials Solutions tasked its managed services specialist partner, Nasstar, with finding a solution that was easy to deploy and scale up or down as the company needed.
The Benefits
SecureAccess effectively improved security for Materials Solutions’ range of cross-platform devices, with Nasstar providing a flexible and scalable service that sits on the existing hosted infrastructure. Charged on a “per user, per month” basis, expenditure is controlled with minimal costs for provisioning additional users as and when required. Materials Solutions also benefit from no upfront or maintenance costs, alongside the other advantages associated with their IaaS offering.
Gordon Green, Director of Engineering at Materials Solutions, said: “With the number of attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in user authentication constantly increasing, Nasstar's SecureAccess solution provides Materials Solutions with the added layer of security needed to minimise the risk to our business.”
The Solution
Nasstar recommended their Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) Service which provides an additional layer of protection at the log-on stage, effectively addressing Materials Solutions’ security concerns. 2FA was installed on the company’s existing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform at Nasstar's datacentre, allowing employees using their own devices to receive an auto-generated One Time Passcode (OTP) in order to log on to the system from outside the network. This authentication step is then verified using a dedicated Management server to prevent accidental and unauthorised access should the device be lost or stolen.
OTP generation is handled via the installation of a mobile app that is compatible with a number of handheld devices, including iOS, Blackberry, Android and Windows Phone, or via traditional hardware tokens. The service has been designed to work alongside a wide variety of third-party products - including Citrix virtual desktops and numerous VPN appliances - making it an ideal deployment for Materials Solutions wherever their employees are based and whatever device they are using.