In today's digital age, businesses prioritise delivering exceptional customer service and growing revenue. Just as their mission relies on a service-oriented staff and quality products, it also requires secure and reliable connectivity. A high performing and secure network enable businesses to offer consistent and positive consumer interactions across online and physical stores around the world. This includes offering services such as e-commerce platforms, secure online payment processing, and digital customer support, while ensuring the protection of customer data and compliance with global privacy standards. Any downtime or security breach can lead to loss in revenues, customers and reputation. This means that connectivity and security go hand in hand.
In order to achieve the best possible uptime, businesses require reliable fixed internet connectivity with wireless/cellular based failover options to reduce the risk of damage to fixed underground cables and long outages. Then businesses need the multiple layers of network security protection to protect their businesses from cyber security threats and risk of compromised and exposed data. Unfortunately, this can result in complex and costly solutions like MPLS based solutions, engaging with 3rd party providers and requiring additional custom solutions which in many cases are impractical and expensive and include additional challenges. Some of the challenges include:
- Unstable Connectivity Across Locations – Businesses require fast, resilient and secure connections across various regional and global locations. This includes stores, branches, data centers, head office, remote workers, and more. A reliable network enables them to communicate with customers, check inventory status, and process transactions, among other activities.
- Security Threats and Risks – Businesses are dealing with organised threat actors and insider threats, not to mention ever evolving sophisticated attacks by criminal organisations.
- High Costs, Low Productivity – All businesses need to reduce expenses while improving efficiency. However, MPLS is pricey, custom VPNs are complex, and using the public Internet often leads to performance issues due to ISPs prioritising cost over quality.
- Complex Tech and Administrative Management – Businesses need reliable and secure network connectivity to support business platforms and customer-facing needs. However, handling the tech stack—procurement, devices, firewalls, management, updates—is complicated and expensive.
Klipboard recognised these challenges and wanted to provide a better way for all our customers to connect to any of our globally hosted cloud-based applications, both now and into the future. We are excited to share with you that we can now provide you with our own connectivity option which is in place commercially with many of our existing customers who are already benefiting from this service, it’s called SecureConnect
What is SecureConnect
A Simple, Secure and Consistent way for our customers to connect to our hosted applications reliably and cost-effectively, from all over the world.
SecureConnect Key Features:
- Quick and Simple Deployment: SecureConnect is simple to deploy, once we ship you a device you can connect your sites or branches with minimal effort. The solution uses any available internet service you have in place at your site, such as dedicated Internet access (DIA), broadband or cellular based connectivity. With the rise of remote work, a secure user-based application with multi-factor authentication can be installed on the user’s laptop and ensures they can safely access the Klipboard hosted application directly from anywhere outside the office, without compromising your business's security.
- Security & Encryption: SecureConnect encrypts all your Klipboard communications bound for our cloud platforms or back to your site, protecting that data from interception and theft by hackers. The site edge device we provide you is dedicated for this purpose only and blocks all inbound access to the device from the internet securing your connections to our hosted infrastructure.
- Reliable & Improved Connectivity: SecureConnect has built-in optimisation technology to automatically choose optimum paths to minimise packet loss and enable faster network recovery. SecureConnect can run active/active connections if you have multiple ISP connections in place with automatic failover/failback, this improves last-mile, as well as diverse routing, to exceed even the up-time targets guaranteed by MPLS based networks. SASE provides built-in SD-WAN. SD-WAN ensures reliable connectivity via commodity broadband links and 4G/5G wireless connectivity. Globally, traffic is routed over a global private backbone with QoS bandwidth prioritization policies, TCP acceleration and packet-loss mitigation, to reduce latency, packet loss, and jitter.
- Cloud Based Provisioning & Support: SecureConnect is managed primarily from the cloud where we have a single pane of glass to manage all our customers connectivity. This means we are able to quickly provision sites very efficiently and it provides us full visibility and detailed reporting into all connectivity coming into our hosted infrastructure from our customers. This greatly improves troubleshooting capabilities by being able to diagnose and identify root causes and problems related to network issues and assists us both in resolving them faster.
- Security Compliance and Privacy: SecureConnect via Cato Networks meets the highest levels of industry standard certifications. You can see more information here: Security, Compliance and Privacy | Cato Networks
SecureConnect Architecture
- SASE (Secure Access Service Edge): SecureConnect is built on what is called SASE which is a network architecture that converges security services and networking capabilities into a single cloud service. SASE represents a shift in the way businesses handle networking and security, moving away from traditional, hardware-based models to a cloud-native, as-a-service model. This provides organizations with high-performing, scalable and secure networking solutions, which are simpler to use and manage.
- Reliable Global Connectivity: SecureConnect is powered by Cato Networks global connectivity solution which provides our customers all over the world with secure and dedicated access to our hosted application infrastructure. The Cato backbone is a geographically distributed, SLA-backed network of 80+ Points of Presence (PoPs), interconnected by multiple tier-1 carriers that commit to SLAs around long-haul latency, jitter and packet loss. Cato also backs its network with 99.999% uptime SLA.
- Enhanced and Comprehensive Security: SecureConnect delivers end-to-end encryption for our hosted cloud platforms and customer locations to connect to the Cato global, private backbone by establishing end-to-end encrypted tunnels using the strongest industry-standard cipher suites, which assures data confidentiality, privacy and secure multitenancy. It includes all customer specific network traffic routing and WAN firewall rules for separation, both in the Cato cloud and our cloud hosting platforms.
- Consistent Ways to Connect: As part of the solution we provide you with a Cato secure edge networking device (Cato Socket) for your sites and a software-based user connection for your remote workers. The secure edge device or Cato socket is locked down and creates a dedicated end-to-end encrypted connection into our cloud network, only allowing the required ports and traffic routing needed to access your Klipboard application, blocking any other traffic both outbound or inbound. The same applies essentially to the software-based user connection. The socket also has built-in automated load-balancing/failover/failback capabilities to make use of your redundant internet options at your sites to optimise your connections, such as across multiple fibre/broadband connections and/or cellular based failover/failback.
Conclusion
SecureConnect is our recommended and preferred way for all our customers to access our hosted applications. By converging software defined networking and network security into a single cloud service through Cato, Klipboard can deliver a consistent and secure experience for customers globally. SecureConnect replaces the need for custom or third-party solutions and/or the complexity of multiple legacy point products with a simple, agile and secure global network access point.
Take the first step in making the best choice for your Klipboard connectivity, contact us today to learn more.
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