FACILITATING EXPANSION
For Intermatic, a global manufacturer of energy control products, a combination of mergers, acquisitions and business expansion drove the company to update its remote access systems.
"We've been undergoing a massive transition, including new product development and en-trance to international markets. Sites that we acquired either had existing infrastructure or we had to build out new infrastructure," says Pete Revel, Intermatic senior project and technology manager. "The biggest challenge was collaboration and finding local integrators. We had to get away from traditional remote access--using firewalls to establish B2B and B2E tunnels--because we were too limited in terms of performance and who we could give access to."
To centralize control and respond more rapidly to workforce needs, Spring Grove, Ill.-based Intermatic this year migrated from a modem pool and a Cisco 3005 VPN to a Juniper SA4000 SSL VPN. "We have about 1,000 workers that will eventually have access to it," says Revel. "Right now we have about 250 users."
The SA4000 has become Intermatic's primary remote access method. "You just host the appliance, integrate critical business applications on the back end, and they're served up to the world," says Revel. "Now, we can just create an account for new users, point them to the right page, and they're in. We can literally have someone functioning within an hour if we've already done the integration for the applications they need."
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