INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Enterprise Security
Canadian power company fortifies
security posture with Pulse Secure
Entegrus, a Canadian energy
company, has deployed Pulse
Policy Secure advanced
network access control.
Pulse Secure, a leading provider of
secure access solutions to enterprises
and service providers, has announced
that Entegrus has successfully deployed
Pulse Policy Secure advanced network
access control (NAC), to strengthen overall
visibility and access security across its
hybrid IT infrastructure.
Entegrus, a Canadian energy company,
leveraged its existing Pulse Secure virtual
private network (VPN) implementation
to expedite NAC deployment and fortify
its infrastructure in accordance with
the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) and North American
Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)
guidelines. As a result, its security
organisation extended visibility for remote
and on-premise users and devices, as well
as enhanced endpoint compliance and
Internet of Things (IoT) risk mitigation.
Entegrus serves more than 58,000
customers throughout Ontario. It brings
electricity, renewable energy and water
across three large regions, with a workforce
spread out over 2,300 square miles.
Entegrus’ objective is to provide safe,
reliable and cost-effective provision of
energy and related billing services, while
providing high levels of service to its
customers, partners and the communities
it serves. IT security plays a critical role in
protecting Entegrus’ delivery of energy and
data services.
“The threat landscape is constantly
evolving, forcing us to always consider
how we can go one step further. With a
widely distributed IT infrastructure, we
considered NAC as an effective way to
improve our security posture without
dramatically altering how we operate,”
said Dave Cullen, Manager of Information
Systems for Entegrus.
“We have a long-standing relationship
with Pulse Secure. The level of integration
between Pulse Secure secure sockets layer
(SSL) and NAC, as well as the extended
feature set, made it a straightforward
choice for us. Perhaps the two most
important things are that we have
increased our security posture, and for
the most part, there has been zero impact
on our end-users.”
Ensuring always active control while
maintaining flexible, seamless access to
network and application resources is an
essential requirement for utility providers.
Within such highly regulated industries,
best practices dictate a constant cycle of
security readiness review and improvement
to meet an increasingly potent threat
posed by cyberthreat actors. NAC provides
foundational endpoint intelligence, resource
access enforcement and IoT defences that
support industry and regulatory compliance
guidelines. These compliance requisites
apply to both regional and large national
critical infrastructure providers.
For stretched IT departments, Pulse
Secure’s Secure Access solutions are
designed to streamline deployment and
ongoing administration using an easy,
integrated, policy-driven platform that
works with a customer’s existing installed
base and network infrastructure.
In addition, Pulse Secure’s VPN solution
utilises the same endpoint client, policy
engine and appliance management as the
NAC solution. Entegrus took advantage
of this platform capability to rapidly
implement NAC. As a result, it gained
dynamic intelligence, unified policy
management, automated enforcement
and threat response through a single
management console.
Cullen highlights numerous benefits,
including a simplified method of managing
complex policies and user access rights, as
well as an enforceable method of checking
end-point devices to ensure that only
properly patched operating systems can
connect to the network. •
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