The Background:

Afford is one of Australia’s largest and most established disability service providers. Afford has more than 70 years of experience working with clients, their families, and carers to achieve their goals and dreams in life and work.

Afford is a registered National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) provider, a Not-for-Profit organisation and a registered charity with the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC). The Afford team works with clients across Australia in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia.

Their mission is to provide innovative, flexible and high-quality support to enhance lifestyle, learning and vocational opportunities for people with a disability and their families and carers. Find out more about Afford here.

Afford's Business Objectives:

“It was a chief priority for the organisation to lift and futureproof its data, digital and IT systems and security, " said Director, IT, Paul Berryman.

• To meet increased regulatory requirements to ensure Right Fit for Risk Certifications (RFFR) and future ISO27001 frameworks.
• To build a scalable and high-performance network infrastructure to support future growth and transformation initiatives.
• To ensure a consistent and high level of security with continuous inspection and simplified policy control across the whole user’s estate to mitigate Cyber risks.
• To provide employees with a great user experience and enable care for clients in the best way.
• To improve network capacity to accommodate future digitisation initiatives.
• To stay within the existing budget.
• To provide visibility of security and application performance.
• To manage remote equipment such as workstations and printers in a geographically dispersed organisation.

The Solution:

Enablis worked closely with Affords IT Director to understand all the organisation’s requirements and future objectives.

“The Enablis team went through an iterative process designing the best architecture options based on the new SASE framework designs utilising Palo Alto Networks Prisma Access and Prisma SD-WAN services,“ stated Paul Berryman, Director IT.

Enablis also reviewed bandwidth needs at each site type and provided a total solution to offer managed services across network carriage, Prisma SASE access and SD-WAN that addressed all compliance and technical needs.

GlobalProtect™ enables protection to mobile workforces by extending the protections of Palo Alto Networks Prisma® Access.

“GlobalProtect allows myself and the entire team to connect securely no matter where we are. I don’t have to do anything. It’s always on,” added Paul.

Prisma Access uses a common cloud-based infrastructure to deliver all the network security services Afford needs, including Advanced Threat Prevention, URL Filtering, sandboxing, DNS security, credential theft prevention, data loss prevention, and Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs).

The Benefits:

"Afford has now been able to deploy consistent security to all locations, we are able to extend a unified and robust security policy from the head office to the branch to the home or anywhere.” added, Paul.

• Afford now has a consistent managed SASE solution across the organisation.
• Security is robust and consolidated.
• All staff have a secure environment at all times.
• Increased capabilities to win new business and tenders.
• Performance improvements include; end-user experience and increased satisfaction for all employees.
• With Enablis and Palo Alto Networks we know we have a highly secure and future proofed infrastructure that will allow our organisation to transform to the needs of our clients without needing to rearchitect or change the foundational services.
• Afford also has true flexibility to drive digital initiatives securely with increased user experience.
• Our IT teams are now on the front foot and can be so much more proactive with support ticket resolution - the number of tickets has reduced significantly. They are also freed up to be much more proactive around our security compliance needs.

The network and SASE framework have provided the confidence to build systems and processes to effectively run the organisation. Enablis and the SASE framework provide a solid foundation for secure growth. commented, Paul Berryman, Director IT.

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