The care service
A home care service with around 80 care staff. Administration works from the head office, and there are ten permanently established home office workplaces.
The starting position
A small firewall was installed at the head office, and the home office workplaces were connected using VPN client software. Each workplace therefore established the connection itself, over the private internet line of the member of staff concerned, using software that has to run on the end device and be maintained there.
The trigger
Connections dropped repeatedly. Transfers broke off mid-process, and inconsistencies appeared in the data. That is a serious matter when care documentation and billing depend on it and several people access the same data set.
For those affected, it meant duplicated work and uncertainty about which version was current. For the management, it was a situation that would have become worse with every additional home office workplace.
The solution
Today, AIMdefense on AIMSTRONG hardware provides central protection at the head office. Each home office workplace has an AIMroute that establishes an encrypted connection to the head office. The connection is therefore no longer established on the end device, but permanently in the device at the site.
All ten sites come together at a single point. That point is the appliance at the head office.
What the appliance contributes
The project does not describe the hardware in detail, and we set out here only what is documented. The AIMSTRONG appliance is the platform carrying the central firewall. It holds the encrypted connections to ten sites that are meant to stay up permanently, and it is the point at which the home office workplaces become branches of the company network.
This is precisely what the range of performance classes is for. Not every head office needs the same machine. A care service with one administrative office and ten connected workplaces has different requirements from a hospital group. The appliance chosen is the one that matches the number of sites and the required throughput, not the largest one available.
The systems are supplied Assembled in Germany.
Implementation
The changeover was completed within six weeks. For the care service it was cost-neutral.
The result
The dropped connections are a thing of the past. Transfers run through to completion, the data set stays consistent, and performance at the home office workplaces has noticeably improved.
Every site is connected via DSL and additionally via LTE. If one path fails, the other takes over, with no need for anyone to intervene. In day-to-day care work this matters, because documentation cannot wait for an engineer.
The care service administers its environment itself. A support contract for AIMdefense stands behind it should it be needed. For the hardware this means that it runs on the customer's premises, under the customer's control, without a service provider having to co-administer it permanently.
"A cost-neutral changeover with real added value. We are very satisfied with the migration and with how straightforward the process was."
— Managing director and owner
Key facts
| Sector | Home care |
|---|---|
| Size | around 80 care staff, 10 home office workplaces |
| AIM products | AIMdefense on AIMSTRONG, one AIMroute per home office |
| Role of the appliance | platform for the central firewall, endpoint for all site-to-site links |
| Previous system | small firewall at the head office, VPN client software in the home offices |
| Architecture | encrypted site-to-site links, redundant via DSL and LTE |
| Supply | Assembled in Germany |
| Support | self-managed with a support contract |
| Project duration | 6 weeks |
More about AIMSTRONG
For the performance classes available and what each of them is designed for, please see the Products page.