Oaklee Housing Association, which manages 4500 properties across Northern Ireland, has just completed its implementation of endpoint data leak-prevention software from DeviceLock.
The new software will give Oaklee comprehensive control over its employees’ access to local ports on their PCs, peripherals and mobile devices to reduce the risk of accidental or malicious data leakage. Oaklee’s DeviceLock project was started and completed during November 2009 and comprises 200 licences costing a total of around £2000.
Brian McKenna, communications manager, Oaklee Housing Association, said, “On the tenant side, there is a lot of delicate personal information we need to protect and encrypt, such as account information, details of vulnerable tenants and arrears histories. There is also a whole host of information on the business that we need to secure. Therefore we wanted to protect ourselves against data leakage, be it accidentally or maliciously.
“We are regulated by the department of social development, so it’s clearly important for us to have the right security procedures. DeviceLock provides us with the right levels of management access to important data and delivers a good balance between functionality and cost. It has also been very easy to implement.”
DeviceLock is a flexible tool for precisely controlling, logging, shadow-copying and auditing end-user access to all types of local ports and peripheral devices, including local and network printers, as well as Windows Mobile, iPhone, Palm and Blackberry smartphones.
Oaklee Housing is also in the process of implementing a new intranet from Sorce and expects it to be operational during Spring 2010.
Oaklee’s previous intranet had been built in-house and was becoming harder to update and limiting the housing provider’s ability to support business process improvements for its distributed workforce.
The Sorce intranet solution was chosen on the strength of its out-of-the-box applications such as document management, image libraries, helpdesk functions and in-built application development environment.
Oaklee plans to extend its intranet beyond just a communication tool and use it as a centralised knowledge repository to consolidate information from other data sources. The intranet is also expected to deliver information to remote workers and to help automate Oaklee’s manual processes.
