A public safety agency has to communicate with dozens of partners – including court systems and social services agencies – each with their own access standards. It also may need to connect to federal resources, such as the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC), which require that local agencies accessing national resources comply with federal security standards. Each agency also sets its own policies for end devices, making it impossible for one public safety agency to mandate its policies to partner organizations.

Hackers constantly scan for open ports across the critical infrastructure of public safety agencies to gain access through brute force and phishing attacks. Without the proper access controls in place, hackers can use an agency’s own credentials to launch ransomware, exfiltrate data on personal information such as criminal records, and spread these devastating attacks to partner agencies.

In many public safety agencies, more than half of the staff may be in the field at any time where they still need to collaborate with partner agencies. That makes enabling secure mobility across the extended public safety enterprise an essential requirement – something that has became even more critical as internal staff and external partners increasingly are working remotely much more frequently due to the pandemic.

A public safety agency can now use Total Access Control (TAC) to provide full control over employee, partner and vendor connections to critical resources and applications from any device with TAC’s clientless RDP application. Many public safety agencies turn to TAC because support for Microsoft’s Unified Access Gateway reached its end of life long ago. These agencies have been able to further consolidate their IT security infrastructure for legacy applications as well.

A glaring problem is that each of those legacy network resources and native applications typically had their own separate ports. Hackers constantly scan the Internet using bots to exploit such open ports for ransomware, malware and data extraction of confidential information, such as criminal records.

Access requests for all applications and resources can now be delivered through TAC, wrapped over a single standard secure SSL port used for all web traffic (443). Users are then only granted access once a public safety agency’s security policies for each resource are met – and they are granted access to only those specific resources, not the entire network.

TAC not only serves the purpose that these multiple solutions previously offered, but it provides another level of security since all of a public safety agency’s resources are now behind a firewall and not exposed to the Internet. TAC’s Multi-Factor Authentication provides much greater protection against phishing, brute force, ransomware, and data exfiltration attacks that hackers try to launch through open ports to the Internet.

TAC also can make it much easier, and yet much more secure, for the tens of hundreds of users at partner governors organizations who need to connect to a typical agency’s network. For instance, TAC is so intuitive that first-time users can quickly start using TAC with concise bulleted instructions from the agency’s network security team.

Also, for security reasons some agencies w make their email solutions publicly available through the Internet. However, internal users can still gain secure access once authenticated through TAC. Another frequent use case is public safety officers who – for obvious reasons – can’t bring along the laptop they may use at their home or office to

report on undercover operations. With TAC, they can quickly, securely and discreetly access the critical information they need on a mobile phone – offering more security both in a virtual and a physical sense to those officers putting their lives on the line in undercover operations.