Meurthe-et-Moselle Departmental Council
Delivering a seamless remote working experience for employees
The Meurthe-et-Moselle Departmental Council
> Local government authority
> 3350 employees across 120 sites
> 120 business applications
Challenges
> Strengthen the security of remote access to the IT system
> Implement a solution enabling employees to work remotely
Benefits
> Secure access to the information system in line with ANSSI recommendations
> A seamless user experience
> Enhanced security when accessing the IT system from unmanaged devices
> Time savings for the IT department, with a single solution for managing all external access
“When we selected the solution, cyberelements had obtained ANSSI’s CSPN certification, which gave me a high level of confidence that it met our security requirements. The solution’s ease of use provides our employees with a seamless remote working experience.”
About the Meurthe-et-Moselle Departmental Council
The Meurthe-et-Moselle Departmental Council covers six service areas and employs approximately 3,350 people across 120 sites. Its employees perform around 140 different roles, ranging from service staff and engineers to social workers and doctors.
The IT Department is responsible for providing IT services and equipment to the various business departments. For the past two years, it has also been providing the same services to the department’s 66 secondary schools.
The Challenge: Delivering a Seamless Remote Working Experience
One of the IT department’s day-to-day priorities is to facilitate and secure remote access to the information system for mobile employees, including family support workers, employees based at sites that cannot easily be connected via a private or alternative network, as well as external partners.
At the same time, the Departmental Council wanted to introduce remote working for its employees, but faced a key constraint: it could not provide every employee with a company laptop. Employees would therefore need to use their own laptops from home.
The IT department was looking for a solution that could secure remote access to its information system while significantly reducing the exposure of its intranet, extranet and the 120 business applications used by employees. The solution also needed to be able to assess and verify the security compliance of the devices connecting to the system.
Why Did the Meurthe-et-Moselle Departmental Council Choose cyberelements to Strengthen Remote Access Security?
After conducting a technology review of three solutions, the IT department chose to test cyberelements Gate through a Proof of Concept (POC) involving 20 employees from four different areas of work.
Following a testing and configuration phase, user feedback was highly positive. Within just four months, cyberelements had been deployed to 600 users.
The Departmental Council also decided to implement cyberelements to secure IT service providers’ access to its information system. Access through cyberelements was first validated with one service provider and has since become the standard approach for all external IT providers.
What Are the Benefits of cyberelements Today?
cyberelements: A Zero Trust Security Solution
cyberelements provides secure access to selected applications within the information system without requiring ports to be opened, relying instead on outbound-only connections. This approach aligns with ANSSI recommendations for securing remote access and was a decisive factor in the selection process.
“One thing that is particularly important to me is following ANSSI recommendations. When we selected cyberelements Gate, the product had obtained ANSSI’s CSPN certification, which gave me a high level of confidence that it met our security requirements,” explains Alban Coujard, CISO.
A Single Portal for Simplified Access and Administration
Another decisive factor for the Meurthe-et-Moselle Departmental Council was cyberelements’ ease of use. Employees can seamlessly access the Departmental Council’s information system remotely through a single portal displaying all the applications available to them.
Alban Coujard confirms:
“It’s actually something our employees would almost ask for internally as well, because they don’t have to go looking for their business applications in different places. Having a single access point is extremely valuable: they log into one portal and have all the applications they need to do their work throughout the day.”
cyberelements also seamlessly verifies the compliance of remote devices connecting to internal applications. These policies can, for example, check whether antivirus software and a firewall are installed and whether security updates are up to date.
This capability was an important consideration for the IT department. Initially, it was not possible to provide every remote employee with a company laptop, meaning employees had to use their personal devices, which were not managed by the IT department, to access the IT system. cyberelements was therefore particularly well suited to this BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) environment.
By providing a single access point to the information system for every authenticated user, cyberelements significantly simplifies the work of the IT team. They only need to configure and manage one solution for all external access. They have also integrated cyberelements with their SIEM solution, enabling them to monitor external access through a single source of logs.
Secure Management of IT Service Provider Access
cyberelements has significantly simplified the management of remote access for IT service providers working on the IT system.
Before the solution was deployed, service providers accessed the IT system through a remote maintenance gateway PC. This setup allowed only one provider to connect at a time and required a member of the IT team to be available to monitor the provider’s activity in real time.
With cyberelements, service providers can now access the information system through a dedicated portal, where they are provided with access to only the applications they are authorized to use. The solution also provides full traceability of these accesses.