Kramp Empowers Everywhere Work with Ivanti Cloud Relay

As Europe’s largest specialist of spare parts and accessories for the agricultural industry, Kramp has the philosophy of always doing its best to make things as easy as possible for others. Its values form the cornerstone of its identity.

The company started out as a small family firm in the Dutch town of Varsseveld. Some 70 years later, Kramp operates in 24 European countries and employs around 3,000 people. Despite this growth, the company has retained a family culture and places value on a local presence as a partner who knows the market and speaks the language.

kramp logo

Benefits at a Glance

Like many organizations in the recent past, Kramp experienced a rapid change from a situation where users were located in the office and always connected to the corporate network to one where users began working from home and other locations — a scenario we refer to as the Everywhere Workplace™.

Following this period of rapid change, Kramp found it difficult to connect to these remote devices, to keep them updated and to maintain user productivity. By adding Ivanti® Cloud Relay to the existing Ivanti Workspace Control environment, Kramp can now communicate with these remote endpoints as though they were located in the office.

Kramp workers can now use secure devices

As long as users’ managed devices are connected to the internet, new configurations and security rules are applied immediately. A consistent environment is maintained across any location or device. Because devices now behave as if connected to the office network, IT response time is faster and the user experience is better overall.

Kramp’s IT organization also benefits from the Ivanti Cloud Relay. Specifically, remote endpoints can be managed, even if they aren’t connected to the corporate network. Management actions — including for the Everywhere Workplace — are centralized, and implementation is quick and easy. The solution is intuitive and easy to use for administrators. What’s more, obtaining approval from the Security Team is much easier, as there is no requirement to open inbound firewall ports.

Challenge

The IT teams needed to address the challenges presented by the Everywhere Workplace scenario, whereby remote users should be managed as if they were connected to the corporate network. This challenge could only be solved at that point in time by adding relay servers to the DMZ subnetwork.

Implementing relay servers in the DMZ created challenges for the security team, due to the need to open inbound firewall ports to allow traffic to flow from the internet to the relay servers. Extra servers would also need to be added to support this configuration and these would have to be managed and kept secure.

“Although we trust the relay-server setup in a DMZ, we wanted to avoid any security risk. Following discussions with the team at Ivanti, we agreed to try out the Ivanti Cloud Relay for a specific group of users,” said Rogier Hoek, System Engineer at Kramp.

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Reducing Complexity with Ivanti Cloud Relay

With the Ivanti Cloud Relay setup, there is no need to add extra servers to a DMZ, nor must ports be opened on the firewall. Ivanti Cloud Relay consists of one or more Cloud Relay Adapter(s) and a Cloud Relay Tenant. The Cloud Relay Adapter has a TLS tunnel open from the on-premises relay servers to the Ivanti Cloud Relay. Upload and download processes running on the Everywhere Workplace endpoints connect securely using TLS to the Ivanti Cloud Relay.

Bi-directional data will now flow from the Everywhere Workplace endpoints to the on-premises relay server via the TLS tunnel.

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Cloud Relay Implemented with Ease

Implementing Ivanti Cloud Relay was a simple, three-step process for Rogier Hoek:

  1. Enable a checkbox in the Ivanti Workspace Control Console that provisioned a Cloud Relay automatically in Ivanti Cloud.
  2. Download, deploy and configure the Ivanti Cloud Relay Adapter
  3. Choose between automatic or managed Agent deployment. As Kramp agreed on testing with a specific group of users, a controlled and managed deployment was done using MEMCM/Intune

Once the agents were configured with the correct connection parameters, they connected automatically to the Ivanti Cloud Relay whenever the on-premises Relay Servers could not be contacted.

“Testing Ivanti Cloud Relay showed us that this simple solution can help solve major challenges. During the test period, Ivanti worked closely with Kramp to quickly solve any issues that we ran into during this great journey,” Rogier Hoek concluded.

The Ivanti Cloud Relay implementation was an easy and smooth project. The implementation solved our Everywhere Workplace challenge.

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