V & A Engineering

The Company
V & A Engineering is a leading independent consulting engineering firm specializing in corrosion engineering, coating systems management, and condition assessment services. V&A’s clients are in the water, wastewater, and transit industries. With the recent acquisition of DeC Consultants and the addition of 16 new employees, V & A Engineering recognized their need to plan for future growth and provide a secure remote access solution for their remote/mobile employees. With this in mind, V & A Engineering invited Vital Signs Technology to help them explore technology solutions that will support their business now and position them for future expansion.

Business Challenge
V & A Engineering’s existing remote access technology is a client-based solution that requires the installation and configuration of software on each remote user’s system. While this is not an inherently bad solution, it does require a very “hands-on” approach to the installation and configuration of the client software and will require additional resources to support as the company grows. This type of solution is also problematic because configuration changes to the PC will often cause client access software to ‘break’, which results in a Help Desk call.

Help Desk calls are routed to a senior employee, who in addition to his core responsibilities as Corrosion Division Manager, is responsible for helping his fellow employees resolve their remote access issues. Having a fellow employee provide remote access support is a common practice in growing companies, however it is not ideal when it causes an in-efficient use of internal resources, which can lead to lost revenue opportunities for the business.

Technology Solution
Vital Signs Technology recommended a clientless architecture solution from Juniper Networks that eliminates the high cost of installing, configuring and supporting client software on every machine.

Juniper Networks is a leading provider of remote access solutions for businesses and their Secure Access SSL-VPN product family is tailored to meet the needs of small businesses, with limited IT expertise, all the way up to high capacity models designed for the needs of the enterprise.

The Juniper Secure Access 700 SSL-VPN (SA-700) provides small and medium businesses with a secure, cost effective way to deploy remote access to the corporate network. The SA-700 uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to enable encrypted transport over the internet from any web browser regardless of location (Home PC, Airport Kiosk or Client Site) or host operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux or mobile device).

The SA-700 deploys quickly and seamlessly integrated into V&A’s existing environment. The clientless architecture, minimal maintenance and a secure, reliable, enterprise quality platform will continue to provide benefits as the company grows.

Results and Benefits
Deploying the Juniper Networks SSL VPN has provided V&A Engineering’s remote employees with seamless and secure access to internal resources from any remote location. The total cost of ownership is significantly less than their previous solution and they have a reliable platform that will grow with their business. Best of all, the, the SA-700 will has allowed the senior manager to move the support burden off his plate and focus his energy supporting his clients and managing the Corrosion Division practice.