Brack Capital Migrates 100 Users to WFH in Two Days Using Cloud VPN

More than 20 small remote offices quickly go online in Germany, Israel, and the Netherlands

I called Perimeter 81 and told them that I needed 100 licenses ASAP since we had to close our offices. Within two days, 100 people were able to work from home. Perimeter 81 was a life-saver for our business.

Amos Geva

IT Manager

Owning and Developing Properties Since 2004

Brack Capital Properties NV (BCP) is a Netherlands-based real estate company traded on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. It owns, manages, and develops residential and commercial properties in Germany worth 1.5 billion Euros. Brack is currently developing five residential projects, including one of the largest residential projects in Dusseldorf near the Grafenberg Forest that includes more than 1,200 apartments and 45 townhouses.

The company’s IT solutions cater to a wide variety of mostly non-technical internal customers at 30 locations, including property and facilities managers, bookkeepers, financial controllers, engineers, and construction managers. A typical property management office includes a hardware firewall, VPN, Internet router, printer, and several computers. Employees accessed cloud-based CRM and email and on-premise ERP and a financial database at the Dusseldorf main office. All traffic from the corporate offices in the Netherlands is routed to and stored in a cloud-based Azure perimeter security solution to comply with Dutch financial regulations.

Website:

Visit website

Industry:

Real Estate

Location:

Netherlands

Employees:

50-249

Workforce:

70% WFH

Network:

50% Cloud

No. Sites:

Download Case Study

140

Employees

48h

from purchase to deployment

70%

WFH Workforce

Hardware VPN Solutions Had Reached End-of-Life

In early 2020, BCP’s hardware-based Juniper VPN system was reaching its end of life. While the company only had a small number of VPN users, they found connecting to the corporate datacenter challenging, and poor network performance and user complaints consumed too much of the IT manager’s time.

“Our Juniper^Ⓡ VPN solution was end-of-life. If more than three or four people were using it at once, it would become abysmally slow,” says Amos Geva, the IT Manager at Brack Capital since 2006. “I read about Perimeter 81 in TechRadar, and the idea of migrating to a cloud-based VPN sounded very interesting. So I ordered ten licenses to try it out. Installation was rapid, and our users were thrilled how easy it was to connect to the network. I was delighted with the product.”

Favorite Features

Always-On VPN

Site-to-Site Interconnectivity

Private DNS

Device Posture Check

Two-Factor Authentication

Zero-Trust Application Access

Timing is Everything, Especially With Covid

In February 2020, Geva, who is based in Israel, was on a trip to BCP’s main office in Germany as Covid started to hit the news. “I asked our management if we needed to make plans, but they told us to wait and see how it develops. When I landed in Israel the next day, I had to quarantine due to the new Covid regulations. Soon after, I was notified that Israel was going to its first public shut down and that we had to close our office.”

“I saw the writing on the wall and called our office in Dusseldorf,” says Geva. “I told them that I had recently installed a great software VPN that would let us rapidly enable our employees to work from home during the pandemic. I called Perimeter 81 and told them that I needed 100 licenses ASAP since we were sending our whole company home. Deployment was swift. Within two days, I had installed 100 licenses, and people were able to work from home. Perimeter 81 was a life-saver for our business”.

An Island of Calm During the Covid Storm

“Transitioning to a mostly work-from-home environment was a bit chaotic since we had very few laptops and there was a critical shortage of them in our supply chain,” says Geva. Since laptops weren’t available, they installed Perimeter 81 on Intel^Ⓡ desktops that people took home, along with their chairs, monitors, and other essential equipment.

“Some were lucky enough to take home Intel^Ⓡ mini-computers and plug them into their monitors and keyboards at home. It wasn’t a laptop, but it was a close second. Others had to make do with 5-year old computers that we had in storage—we just reformatted them and got them quickly ready for use.”

Critical Workers Needed in Some Offices

But not everyone was able to work from home. “We couldn’t shut down our whole operation. Property managers still had to go to work at least once a week. We have 12,000 residential units with families that need services. They are critical workers that must go into the office even during a government-mandated shutdown.”

For Geva, Perimeter 81 was an island of calm in the storm. “Perimeter 81 was always available to answer our questions. Their expertise was extremely helpful, and they were there every step of the way to help us very rapidly scale our WFH workforce.”

A Boutique Level of Service Ensures Success

Perimeter 81’s ease of use helped Geva rapidly deploy the solution, but it wasn’t the only key to Brack Capital’s WFH success. “Perimeter 81 gives you a personal Customer Success Manager who delivers a boutique level of service that complements their unique software solution. A lot of time, when you work with a large famous-name vendor, you’re just a number and can get lost in the system. But with Perimeter 81, if I need something related to the product or even to best practices used by other companies, I can call my account manager and get a response right away. This level of service is critical to our business since we can’t have 100 people not working.”