Discover how the team at Telford and Wrekin Council safely migrated 1000+ users across from DirectAccess to AOVPN, whilst securely setting up COVID testing centres – all with AOVPN DPC!
We were already working with Telford and Wrekin Council on some issues they were facing with their AOVPN, so they were the first people our Head of Identity and Access told when we finished building AOVPN DPC!
They could see the potential benefits of the solution, and so became early adopters of AOVPN DPC.
We started working with Richard Marsh, Cloud & Domain Services Architect, to test and validate the solution against their needs and existing environment, ensuring the solution could be rolled out safely to their end users with little-to-no interruption as designed.
After the team at Telford Council had tested the solution on a limited number of devices and were happy with it, we planned a phased roll out – something we recommend on most projects. We then went through a trial period to ensure the solution met their needs, before moving onto a license agreement with support included for the first year.
“I couldn’t be happier… …we’ve 100% seen the benefits of DPC”
What do Telford and Wrekin Council think?
It’s been a great product to use and very reliable – if any issues arose the team have always been on hand to help rectify them or quickly fix any bugs (which have been few and far between).
Even as a beta tester for the client, it was rare to find any bugs.
PowerON fix things properly, they take the time and effort to analyse the issue and create a sustainable solution.
I have seen DPC grow and mature over the past couple of years with new features being introduced which even surpass the abilities of tunnel administration via XML.
Each new DPC release introduces greater stability, greater feature sets whilst maintaining backwards compatibility with older DPC clients.
DPC requires a well designed and stable AOVPN environment, but it’s very easy to deploy.
“Overall it’s been fantastic, not just with Leo but all the professional services team, everyone I’ve spoken to at PowerON has been great. Leo goes out of his way to help, even if the issue isn’t related to the current project.”
It provides a safety net in some ways, as previously if we had a problem with either the user or device tunnels, the client machine would need visibility of our network to resolve the issue. Now all we need are some registry settings and the DPC agent. We can remote in, delete or reboot, and because DPC is local to the machine is simply recreates everything and fixes the issue.
We’ve used DPC to migrate 1000+ devices away from DirectAccess.
We have customers working outside of the borough who rarely come into the office, with DPC we’ve been able to switch client machines from DirectAccess to AOVPN even whilst they were at home. We have the DPC group policy applied to all workstations, so we could migrate devices from DirectAccess to AoVPN at a moments notice. DPC has simply provided us the confidence to do this.
How has DPC helped the council?
“Before the pandemic it wasn’t common for our customers to work remotely, so when the pandemic hit we had to get everyone set up to work remotely as soon as possible. Although Direct Access was heavily relied on, it lacked compatibility with many council hosted systems. DPC enabled us to deliver AoVPN far more reliably than before, it reduced the time and risk and complexity as we no longer had to worry about XML configurations.
“…we were very lucky that we had so many things in place and DPC was the cherry on the cake - it came in and helped us deliver AOVPN at a faster pace and enabled us to move people off DirectAccess”
One scenario in particular that allowed DPC to really shine early on was when we created COVID testing centres at the beginning of the pandemic.
We suddenly had 5/6 different user profiles logging onto the same device, with users rotated every 3-4hrs. We started having issues with the powershell delivered user tunnel installs which would require IT to log in and fix the issue each time, across numerous testing sites with numerous machines. Troubleshooting the user tunnel install failures across so many devices was very time consuming, so we installed DPC on these machines first and it handled delivery of the user and device tunnels perfectly. This alone proved to us that DPC was a great investment and saved us a lot of time and trouble.”
“Telford and Wrekin Council has been a pleasure to work with and the product wouldn’t be where it is today without their hard work and dedication, we’re very happy to have been able to enable them to meet their remote access needs."
What is AOVPN DPC?
Dynamic Profile Creator (DPC) service is a Windows service which runs on each client device. It receives configuration via group policy (or other tools which support registry configuration) and generates the profile automatically on the device. This enables easy administrative management, dynamic Active Directory based group management, automatic updating to Office 365 routes and more.
AOVPN DPC is designed to provide the following benefits:
- Consistent profiles
- Always up to date
- Profiles Updated on Disconnect (ensuring minimal user interruption)
- Office 365 Exclusions are updated automatically and without admin interaction
- Graphical Management Experience
- No XML creation required
- Manage through Intune or Group Policy
- Full help documentation of options
- Supports all common configuration options (Including Custom Cryptography)
- Easy deployment
- Simple EXE or MSI deployment
- No scripting required for deployment
- Profile changes are handled automatically without redeployment of client
Interested? Learn more about AOVPN DPC here.
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AOVPN DPC Webinar with Richard Hicks
Join our next webinar where Head of Identity and Access Leo D’Arcy will be joined by Richard Hicks for an overview of DPC version 3.0 and a Q&A.
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