A black and white image of a modern office with three people working at computers, viewed through a glass window. The room is dimly lit, with illuminated screens and reflections visible, giving a high-tech and focused atmosphere.

It was at 2 a.m. on January 23, 2020 that 11 million residents of Wuhan – the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic – learned the city was being locked down to slow the spread of the deadly virus. It wasn’t long before other cities, states and whole nations followed suit, ordering residents to stay home and requiring non-essential businesses to close their offices, factories and stores.

Recognizing the seriousness of the situation, we offered customers our Mobile Entry Point (MEP) solution in early February to support their Business Continuity efforts. MEP is a remote access solution that enables employees working from home to connect to their corporate networks and securely access data and applications vital to performing their jobs.

To date, 72 enterprises are keeping their operations going thanks to MEP and the over 135,000 of their employees able to work from home – without creating vulnerabilities that bad actors can exploit to penetrate critical systems. Enterprises continue to deploy our MEP solution, with 45 new enterprise customers and support for 62,500 employees added over a two-week period in March.

A great customer success story is that of Chemours, a Fortune 500 company in the chemicals industry. A global organization with approximately 10,000 employees and over 60 facilities worldwide, they are using our MEP solution to securely connect their remote workers with their Microsoft Azure implementation.

Chemours CIO Dean Meyer had this to say in a LinkedIn comment: “Thanks to the Open Systems team and the scalability of their Mobile Entry Point solution our transition to working from home could not have got any better. Thanks OS!”

Keys to Success

Our MEP solution leverages the lessons we’ve learned over 30 years of enabling organizations to securely and flexibly connect their clouds, branches, applications and employees anywhere in the world.

The advantages of our MEP solution include:

  • Fast activation: To get enterprises up-and-running quickly, we developed MEP to be easily deployed and for immediate activation. We accomplished this by centrally managing the solution ourselves, so we can configure them and set their policies with the push of a button.
  • Multiple deployment options: MEP can be deployed virtually in the cloud for enterprises using Microsoft Azure or AWS, or they can be installed on an Open Systems’ edge device for enterprises with their own data center infrastructure on-premises.
  • Secure end-to-end connectivity: Secure mobility clients installed on remote workers’ laptops, smartphones and desktop computers ensure a secure end-to-end connection with the nearest MEP over an encrypted DTLS connection. Two factor authentication further increases security and using certificate authentication allows for seamless user authentication. Corporate Access Groups enable granular access control by only allowing authorized users to access certain network resources.
  • Excellent user experience: MEP establish network-level connections, allowing clients such as personal computers, laptops and mobile phones to access network resources from home or from anywhere in the world as if they were on site.
  • It’s a Managed Service: Unlike most remote access products, we offer our MEP solution as part of a managed service that includes holistic technical consulting, rapid setup and deployment, customer portal access and continuous lifecycle management. Our team of Level 3 network and security DevOps engineers provide 24x7 support, enabling customers’ internal IT staff to focus on other critical IT-related activities during this unprecedented crisis.

We're Not Done Yet

As successful as it has been, we will continue to improve our MEP’s networking and security features, capabilities and performance by leveraging advances in the ongoing development of our related Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), SD-WAN and Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services.

Please review the following for additional information about our MEP solution: