City connects users to the right resources securely

The City of Norwalk is located in Fairfield County in southwestern Connecticut on the northern shore of Long Island Sound. It lies within both the New York and the Bridgeport metropolitan areas. Approximately 89,000 people live in Norwalk. The city currently employs about 750 people.

The Challenge

The City of Norwalk was faced with multiple challenges. It needed to both support its remote workforce and ensure that citizens receive high-quality, effective services.

The city’s legacy Cisco VPN solution was becoming more and more difficult to manage. This was due to scalability, security and compatibility issues. Users had to rely on the legacy VPN solution to access on-premises datacenter applications and third-party applications. But this resulted in an unstable user experience and increased the attack surface.

Management

The city’s remote employees and contractors had problems accessing the municipal datacenter. The IT team had to find ways to implement workarounds and provide cross-platform support, especially for Microsoft Windows 10 and later.  

Security

With cities increasingly in the crosshairs of threat actors, Norwalk was concerned about third-party vendor connections to its network. Broad access and lack of visibility to lateral movement across the environment prevented the security team from implementing granular micro-segmentation with zero-trust security. Another risk factor was the legacy VPN solution, which was no longer supported by the vendor.

User Experience

Employees and contractors had trouble accessing applications due to poor performance and software incompatibility across platforms. This negatively impacted productivity.  

The Solution

“…The Proofpoint Meta zero-trust approach provided us with the means to create micro-segmentations to granularly define exactly which resources would be permitted to which users.”
- Anthony Mathieu, desktop support technician, City of Norwalk

Proofpoint Meta offers a scalable cloud-native global backbone, with high-performance connectivity at any time from any location. City employees and contractors can now seamlessly connect to the environment.

The Results

Easy Deployment

Proofpoint Meta was easy to deploy by loading a lightweight MetaPort virtual machine and running the onboarding command. The city’s IT team was able to easily set micro-segmentation policies and provide secure connectivity to users and applications in its dual datacenter infrastructure.

Simplified Management

Instead of spending time on firewall configurations, Proofpoint Meta provided Norwalk with seamless virtual micro-segmentation of the datacenter for granular identity-based access.

Enhanced Security

The Proofpoint Meta Connect web feature made it easy and safe to connect. There was no need to install a VPN agent. And users can view and access only the resources they need.