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How Venn Helped a Global Digital Engagement Services Company Manage Compliance and Security on Secure BYO-PC
A Global Digital Engagement Services Company has a constantly growing CX team that includes both employees and contractors that work remotely to support the company’s many customers which include organizations in social media, gaming, and many other platforms.
The company’s experts provide customer support, community management, content moderation, social media interaction, and additional trust and safety services. Some of this work involves real-time interaction, while other tasks focus on reviewing content — like text, video, and images — to ensure that it complies with guidelines. Employees hail from countries around the world, spanning every age group, with varying levels of technical background.
In short, managing their extensive decentralized team is a core element of the company’s business success.
The company has been at the forefront of remote work, long before COVID was a factor. At the core of their corporate DNA is the belief that there is little benefit to forcing employees to travel to an office to work 9-5 from a cubicle when they are much more interested — and motivated — working at their own schedule, on projects they prefer, in whatever physical environment makes them most comfortable.
Naturally, this policy comes with its own challenges. One of the most important is security and meeting compliance for clients. Working remotely and with many contractors means that the line between personal and work laptops and applications is often blurred. With many working on “BYOD” computers, it makes it difficult to isolate the two aspects of one’s “digital existence” in a way that can ensure that personal use is separated from the secure and compliant environments that the company’s clients expect.
For some of their clients, it’s not simply a preference but a requirement: regulations like PCI and HIPAA compliance, for example, demand a bullet-proof technical framework. The company tried VDI but found it to be expensive, complicated and users weren’t enjoying working with it due to latency and performance issues. And secure Enterprise Browsers weren’t able to meet many of their customer’s compliance needs.
With a variety of client sectors, there are a lot of “moving parts” and one of the key challenges in implementing a secure environment is onboarding new contracted experts. With the fluid, non-stop growth of their global team, the company required a solution that would take little time for the company’s own Support team to set up and train for each new recruit; it had to be straightforward and intuitive enough for individuals with all types of backgrounds to master and get to work quickly. And it needed to provide users with the flexibility to work on Secure BYOD laptops (BYO-PC) whether they be Mac or PC.
The company was eager to adopt a Secure BYO-PC platform that could easily help them secure remote work. With Venn, work lives in a company-controlled Secure Enclave installed on the user’s PC or Mac, where business activity is isolated and protected from any personal use on the same computer. This allows users to securely work in applications provided both by the company and their clients as well as browser-based tasks.
According to the company’s Chief Information Security Officer and Director of IT, they need this broad, “safe-cage” approach with Venn’s Secure Enclave to be ready for any challenge: “When we get new clients, we never know what we’re going to be asked to do. We couldn’t confidently be ready for anything with our VDI environment.” By working with Venn, the company has been able to mostly eliminate their need for VDI.
Venn allows the company to configure security policies that specifically help protect their client’s sensitive data, instead of having to protect the entire device. Policies can control which applications can run inside Venn, where data can be saved, and actions such as downloads, copy/paste, printing and screenshotting.
They also prefer the Venn solution to enterprise browsers because often, a client wants to provide their own VPN, or mobile VPN, and suddenly the solution doesn’t work and they can’t guarantee users wouldn’t use their own Chrome browsers to do work. “That would take them outside of the secure environment,” he explains. “This is where we use Venn. Once on the Venn platform, they can only use our software within Venn’s Secure Enclave.”
From an onboarding perspective, their System Administrator who is in charge of onboarding new clients and users says, “The feedback that I hear from users is that it’s much faster, especially compared to using VDI. And it’s simple. Users don’t have to do a lot of configurations to get set up. They basically install it and they can click on a couple of icons and the simplicity is really great. When users compare it to their old solution to Venn, they’re like, wow, this is leaps and bounds, better.”
The company can now use Venn as a selling point in RFPs for new clients. They explain that it helps leverage a universal, consistent security approach as dictated by the client, with robust, centralized administrative control over work applications and data including policies for network access, peripheral use, copy–paste and more.
In particular, because Venn is built with turnkey compliance for a variety of regulations, the company can focus on clients with strict regulatory restrictions like HIPPA, providing full documentation of the measures in place in the Venn platform.
Onboarding users has become a quick process that is little more than downloading an app, launching it, as following the streamlined UI. Little training is required, saving everyone substantial time in getting new contractors into productive work. And for the project managers, the quick setup and security controls is very appealing.
Feedback from the users has been extremely positive. As the Systems Administrator explains: “Separating work/personal use really seems to be appealing to the users. They don’t want their work to hamper their freedom and flexibility when they aren’t working, and Venn makes that easy.”
The company’s System Administrator sums up the nature of working with Venn: “Where Venn has really been shining is they seem to be a company that truly cares about its customers. I think it’s very easy to be forgotten about once you have established a relationship with a company. With Venn, every interaction I have had has been productive and a pleasure. On every issue or question we have run into with the platform, Venn has been quick to respond and resolve it. The communication has been wonderful.”
Digital Engagement Services
2007
Silicon Valley
Privately Held
