It was a hot summer’s day just under twenty years ago when my mobile phone rang. The weather during my holiday had been kind so far: the days hot, the pool warm and the drinks cool. It was beginning to feel like a well-earned rest, but as usual, work has a way of intruding and making itself known. I had been taking a break from the sunshine and was updating my parent’s home PC - as you do - when the call came in. An invitation to tender had been released and would I comment on it. I agreed.

Normally, I would have walked to my bedroom and returned with the work-issued laptop to the study, plugged in the ethernet connection, fired Windows 98 up, logged in to the VPN (or tried to - they were very temperamental at times), opened up my email client and then launched the Word document from my email. But this time, I didn’t do any of this.

I fired up the browser on my parent’s PC instead and moments later was accessing my own personal Windows desktop where the email client was already syncing the latest emails. Within a minute, I was reading the document in Word, running on a Windows server on the other side of the world. I was ready to call back and pass on my thoughts and advice on the tender straightaway.

I shut down the session and went back to the pool, armed with a cold beer to celebrate. All this had taken place in the time it would have taken me to fetch my work laptop and start it up. That’s when I realised that I had made the right choice in joining my new employer, Netilla Networks.

SSL VPN technology was way ahead of its time, allowing users to access Microsoft Windows Terminal Services (now Remote Desktop Services) over RDP through a secure browser session from literally any PC anywhere in the world. In the days when the Citrix alternatives were slow, clunky and very expensive, the Netilla solution stood out from the crowd. It was fast, lean and, thanks to some early end-point attestation and containerisation technologies, secure too.

You could use it from an unmanaged home PC, or even an internet cafe PC, without having to install software or change any settings. It was an amazing and game-changing technology.

Netilla sadly is no more. However, the story doesn’t end there.

Our main competitors back then weren’t the traditional VPN vendors or even Citrix, but another SSL VPN solution from a company called NetScreen, subsequently purchased by Juniper Networks. Recently, many of their VPN technologies were hived off into an independent company, Pulse Secure.

Pulse Secure continues to develop the original SSL VPN technology and incorporate the latest advances in end-device health and security attestation, delivering a superlative “remote desktop from any client” solution.

Curiously, nearly twenty years on and due to the current pandemic, this SSL VPN technology is more relevant than ever before.

Covid-19 has forced most organisations to rethink their working from home strategies. Many have found existing solutions are often unreliable, expensive to scale (both to procure and maintain) and deliver a less than stellar user experience, often impacting on user productivity as well as compromising on security. Organisations want to deliver secure access to data and applications, but ideally to unmanaged devices, including home PCs, where the device health cannot be guaranteed. This is precisely what Pulse Secure delivers.

Contact us if you’d like to know more about this flexible, cost-effective way of improving your remote access experience and security. After all, a zero-trust network access solution may be what the doctor ordered.

We believe mission-critical apps are at the very heart of modern digital transformation. Yet, reporting to senior management how these are being utilised across your estate - and whether they are being kept up to date or not - has never been easy.

Unused devices represent a significant wasted opportunity (and cost) for a Mobile IT deployment. Devices that are sitting unpowered in user's drawers, lying forgotten at home, or otherwise ignored, represent a direct financial loss to the business and also an opportunity cost in potential productivity gains. How do you recover those devices and repurpose that initial investment?

Corporate buy-in for large-scale enterprise mobility projects is often much easier to achieve than for behind-the-scenes infrastructure upgrades. A mobile-enabled workforce brings tangible business benefits in the form of cost savings and increased productivity, regardless of industry sector.

Looking at MobileIron for the first time? In this helpful guide we offer clarification on the different licensing models available and their features.

Your existing MobileIron licence could well be costing you significantly more than it needs to. Discover how to save your business money when renewing.

One question is almost certainly front of mind as your MobileIron licence renewal date approaches: how can you reduce costs while adding value to your subscription?

Mobile devices, although equally at risk as traditional PCs and servers, may not have been top of your organisation's priority patch list, but with increasing amounts of sensitive corporate data being stored and accessed from these devices, they should be.

The recent Meltdown and Spectre announcements have seen wide media coverage this past week and prompted a fair amount of extra work for IT teams across the globe.

If you work in IT, I suspect that you have recently spent a fair amount of time ensuring your systems are patched against these vulnerabilities. However, I suspect that you have also spent a considerable amount of time dealing with enquiries from others asking about these vulnerabilities and your own organisation's risk.

Details are finally emerging on a couple of serious security issues that have received much media attention and speculation: Meltdown and Spectre.

Today, employees require immediate and flexible access from a wide range of device types and form factors. In the modern, connected and mobile world, the traditional USB drive is dead. Your users are already using and demanding Dropbox as their preferred collaboration and sharing service, so why not empower your users and gain control and visibility over their use of this unique solution?

At Bridgeway, providing quality solutions to our customers has always been a top priority. Since day one, we’ve been committed to hand-picking the best technologies to fit our customers’ needs. That’s why it was an easy decision for us to join the Dropbox Partner Network and add Dropbox for Business to our portfolio of partner offerings.  So why are we so excited?

A look at how organisations can approach understanding the drivers and the processes involved in their mobility projects, and planning for how to ensure overall project success.

I recently gave a presentation at the Enterprise Mobility Management Conference in London, where I discussed the typical lifecycle of a mobility project and what ensures a project's success. Before embarking on a mobility project, I think it’s important for organisations to understand the processes involved in the project, and to consider what they want to obtain from it.

Back in 2011, the Department of Health published a progress report from its National Mobile Health Worker Project, which was designed to examine the potential technical and business benefits of mobile working in community health services. It’s interesting to note that while the technology has evolved since then, the challenges of integrating mobile into the day-to-day running of the NHS remain consistent...

Back in 2011, the Department of Health published a progress report from its National Mobile Health Worker Project, which was designed to examine the potential technical and business benefits of mobile working in community health services.

Lack of consistent mobile Web access is hampering business activity - but what can be done about it?

These days, people expect decent internet access wherever they go, whether they’re on a train or at the pub. However, we’ve all experienced the frustration of not being able to log on when we’re out and about. The fact remains that the quality of mobile network coverage varies greatly across the UK.  Many parts of the country, mostly (but not exclusively) rural areas, suffer from poor or practically non-existent coverage, while the quality of mobile coverage on Britain’s road, rail and underground networks is failing to meet commuters’ expectations. As more and more business is conducted online and on the move, this lack of connectivity is hurting the UK economy.

The first in a series of blogs that look at how businesses can change the way they manage their IT to accommodate the mobility wave.

Business IT is undergoing fundamental changes right now – changes that are as fundamental and far-reaching as when your company first connected to the Internet back in the 90s.  What’s more, these changes are probably not part of your existing IT strategy, but they’re happening all the same.

Last Saturday, I was scanning through the papers and ended up at a regular feature in the Guardian Weekend Magazine called 'Blind date'. This involves two readers going on a blind date and then each of them reporting on the experience, in turn responding to various questions on the date. The final question they are asked is whether they would hope to meet again...

Last Saturday, I was scanning through the papers and ended up at a regular feature in the Guardian Weekend Magazine called 'Blind date'.  This involves two readers going on a blind date and then each of them reporting on the experience by responding to various questions about the meeting. The final question they’re asked is whether they would hope to meet again.

Last night, a serious security vulnerability was disclosed. POODLE affects SSL v3 client and server communications, allowing a man-in-the-middle attack to decrypt the session and recover session cookies. For more information, read on...

Last night, a serious security vulnerability in Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) was disclosed.  This vulnerability, named POODLE, affects SSL v3 client and server communications, allowing a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack to decrypt the connection, recovering session data and cookies.

This week, something happened which could sound the death knell for the use of memory sticks in business. The code for an unpatchable vulnerability which undermines the security of USB devices, and can turn any such device into a malicious agent, has now been published online. Is it time to finally say goodbye to the USB drive?

In 2009, I was working with a vendor of secure USB memory sticks.  The devices were intended to mitigate the risks of data losses by automatically encrypting data copied onto them.  At that time, data breaches by public and private sector organisations resulting from lost USB drives and laptops were regularly in the headlines, so a memory stick with onboard encryption was a simple, effective solution to a common problem.

A new vulnerability has been discovered in a common Unix and Linux component, the Bash shell. This exploit is remotely exploitable and patches have been released for all the major operating systems. If you run any Unix or Linux systems, we recommend you test for the vulnerability immediately. Find out more and how to test for this exploit by following the link... (updated)

A new vulnerability has been discovered in a common Unix and Linux component, the Bash shell.  This exploit is remotely exploitable and patches have been released for all the major operating systems.

Today, Bridgeway announces an agreement with ITSE that moves the support agreements for ITSE’s MobileIron mobility customers to Bridgeway. We are absolutely thrilled to welcome the many thousands of users who now join our existing thousands. We are now MobileIron’s largest specialist UK partner.

Welcome to our IT Security Experts (ITSE) customers

A very quick message to welcome all visitors to the new look Bridgeway website! We hope that you like the new logo, colours and site design.

A very quick message to welcome all visitors to the new look Bridgeway website! We hope that you like the new logo, colours and site design. We will be adding richer content over the coming weeks and have great plans for releasing thought leadership pieces in this blog for you to comment on and use.