Case Study: Ubity

Secure Access From the Comfort of Home

Since 2007, Ubity has been the leading Canadian provider of hosted telephony and unified business communications. Ubity has more than 20,000 users on its platform, and is trusted by over 850 industry-leading companies from all around the world. They make business communication easy and manageable by providing solutions such as cloud-based phone systems, unified communications, contact centers, secure SIP trunking, management portals, and software integration.

The Challenge

Ubity is an efficient technology company that has about 30 employees. The company encourages work-life balance by allowing their office team members to work from home at their discretion — and also by hiring employees that work exclusively from remote locations. Ubity was faced with the challenge of allowing their employees to work remotely, while still providing secure access to their office network and the other internal systems that employees needed to accomplish their essential duties.

Our Solution

Ubity used OpenVPN Access Server to provide the needed secure remote access to their employees. Setup was a breeze with the local database acting as the authentication source. It was configured quickly using usernames and complex passwords for employee authentication. An additional layer of identity security was enforced by requiring the use of the integrated Google Authenticator as the method for second-factor authentication when connecting with the VPN.

The employee setup was equally painless. Upon receiving an email with the credentials and the link to the OpenVPN Access Server client portal, the employees simply visited the client portal and logged in to download the VPN client software — OpenVPN Connect Client. OpenVPN Connect Client, which is available for use on a variety of desktop operating systems, came bundled with the connection profile, so there was no complicated configuration needed. The client portal also showed a QR code to initialize Google Authenticator for the employee. All that is left for the employee to do now to get access to the corporate network is to use OpenVPN Connect Client to connect to the office VPN, enter the username and password when prompted, followed by the 6 digit Google Authenticator response code.

Further Reading