Case Studies

With budgets and spending coming under the microscope this financial year, the pressure is unquestionably on local authorities to find the most efficient ways of working. With approximately 188,500 citizens to support, Portsmouth City Council was been keen to rationalise – and thereby reduce its spend – on complex systems and processes.
PCC turned to Gradian [...]

Portsmouth City Council had previously undertaken a project to comply with security requirements to connect to the Government Connect Secure Extranet (GCSX). This is a private Wide Area Network (WAN) which enables secure interactions between connected local authorities and other Government Secure Intranet (GSi) connected organisations, including the Department of Work and Pensions and the Police National Network.

As Europe’s largest regional low cost airline, Flybe carries over 7 million passengers between 56 airports in the UK and Europe each year. Some 85% of these passengers book their flights online, resulting in vast amounts of confidential data, including credit-card information, travelling over the Internet.

Travers Smith wanted to remain ahead of fraudsters by further strengthening the security of their IT estate. The firm focused initially on secure messaging and whole disk encryption, and then turned their attention to enhanced user identity verification – so called two-factor or multi-factor authentication. This combines something a customer knows (such as a user name and password) with something a customer has (such as a one-time transaction password generated by a token or hand held device).

Static passwords or PIN numbers for authentication have several security drawbacks as evidenced in just some of the fraud attacks described above. A better, more secure way of authentication is “two-factor” or “strong authentication” based on one time passwords (OTP). The South American Bank our partner Cidway worked with, was interested in deploying a software application that could generate an OTP and provide banking customers the ability to perform secure transactions on their mobile phones.

The Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is used to being on the cutting edge of curing illness, and is renowned for its specialised services and research, including head trauma treatment, cancer treatment and maternity services. However, with over 10,000 email users, the Trust found it was encountering something it could not cure on its own, namely a slew of dangerous viruses – computer viruses.