Isle of Wight Council has selected Becrypt, an IT and data security firm, to provide secure mobile working to its officers.

The Council has ordered 400 licences for Becrypt’s Trust Client offering, which will be provided to senior managers, case workers and mobile staff to use on multiple devices including key fobs, USB sticks and laptops to enable them to access the Council’s virtual private network remotely.

The Trusted Client offering will be used as part of a complete secure technology offering comprising VMware View, thin client desktop virtualisation software, via the Council’s secure VPN.

The offering assumes that the host computer is compromised and restarts it, booting into a corporate OS image; and gives a trusted environment from the start because it is totally isolated from the host computer’s OS. In addition, the host hard drive is not accessed so there is no cross contamination of malicious code and no data can be saved locally which stops data leakage.

The mobile working offering is part of an ICT computing project that forms part of a wider strategic rationalisation programme that includes the refurbishment of the County Hall and relocation of staff through the closing of some local offices.

Isle of Wight Council ICT strategic development manager Roger Brown said that as part of their buildings rationalisation programme they needed to have a secure and cost effective remote access method, that is also GCSx CoCo compliant.

"Becrypt Trusted Client has a simple, customisable interface that allows us to centrally manage and control the end user experiences," Brown said.