Case Study: Local Government ​Remote Desktop

How a New Mexico State Agency Enabled
700+ Remote Desktops in Less Than a Week
CHALLENGE

NO. OF EMPLOYEES700

LOCATION
Santa Fe, NMMISSION
Collecting and distributing tax revenue
according to laws of the state ofNew Mexico

The IT group for the New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department needed to expand their
existing remote desktop environment, which consisted of a Guacamole implementation, to theentire agency for business continuity through the Covid-19 pandemic. This necessity required
expanding the scope of the implementation, and to do this, IT highly desired a commercial
product with professional support.

SOLUTION
The department deployed three instances of Keeper Connection Manager, which is Keeper
Security’s commercial build of the open source remote desktop platform, Apache Guacamole.
Keeper Connection Manager also provided vital support so that the Department could scale
appropriately and provide two-factor authentication for additional security.

BENEFITS
Within one week, all 700 employees were securely accessing their desktops from home. Endusers need only a standard browser and login credentials to access their desktops from anydevice. Security was maintained, and business operations continue with near normal capacity.

In February 2020, the IT group at the New Mexico Taxation andRevenue Department recognized that they needed to prepare
for a potential COVID-19 quarantine. As part of that preparation,
they needed to rapidly deploy a solution that would enable thedepartment’s more than 700 employees to access their desktops
from home. Security was the IT team’s top priority, and theywanted a commercial product with professional support for theexpanded implementation of Apache Guacamole, which had
previously used as an IT tool. Keeper Connection Manager wasdiscovered, evaluated and implemented.
Not every employee has a work machine that they can easily
bring home, as many use desktops, so deploying VPN client
software on employees’ personal computers was not an option.
“This avenue provided an optimal route to effectively extend auser’s desktop to a remote location, gracefully, securely, andeconomically,” said Mike Baca, CIO of the New Mexico Taxation
and Revenue Department.

An Open Source Solution - Apache Guacamole
The IT organization had been using the open source ApacheGuacamole remote desktop platform for over a year to conduct
maintenance, troubleshoot issues and make updates after hours
without having to go into the office. Originally, it was intended
for IT use only, but other employees heard about the capability

through the grapevine, so IT extended it for a few employees
outside the IT organization.
The deployment, however, remained small and supported no
more than a few dozen users. The Apache Guacamole platform
offered a number of advantages.
First, the platform is secure. Strong security was a key
requirement. There’s no need to deploy a client on end users’machines, and all communications are encrypted via a securesession. The desktops, themselves, are never exposed to thepublic Internet.
Additionally, in order to comply with Payment Card Industry(PCI) security requirements, the New Mexico Taxation andRevenue Department needed to use two-factor authentication
with end users — that’s simple to do with Apache Guacamole.
It was also very simple for employees to use. All they needed
was standard web browser and a Google Authenticatorsmartphone app.
This let them access their desktops from any device. LDAP andGoogle Authenticator integrate easily, out-of-the-box.
Performance is fast, because the platform optimizes
compression and minimizes the amount of processing on theend-user’s device.

© 2022 Keeper Security, Inc.

DATASHEETCaseStudy

KeeperEnterprise
Local Government​RemoteDesktop

Glyptodon [now KeeperConnection Manager] provided
an optimal route to effectively
extend a user’s desktop to aremote location, gracefully,securely, and economically.
– Mike Baca, CIO of the New Mexico
Taxation and Revenue Department
Keeper Connection Manager Provides Support andSoftware to Scale Quickly
Cisneros and his team knew, that if they were going to scaleout the existing remote access environment into a teleworking
infrastructure for the entire agency, they’d want commercial
support and product to do so.
Keeper Connection Manager is a commercial build of Apache
Guacamole that’s designed to be much easier to deploy on
the back end and comes with frequent updates to enable newcapabilities and enhancements. All releases are backwards
compatible, so an update will never break the platform. That’s
not guaranteed to be the case if one is using their own build of
the Apache Guacamole source code.
Keeper Security also provides professional support directlyfrom engineers who have deep expertise in the product andits implementation. In addition, Keeper Connection Manager
provides out-of-the-box integration with Keeper Secrets
Manager. to seamlessly manage credentials for connections toprivileged systems in the Keeper Vault.

The department ultimately set up three instances of Keeper
Connection Manager with load balancing to ensure good
performance, all of which Keeper Connection Manager helped
support. All 700 employees were up and running within a week.
But even when the stay-at-home orders are lifted and, looking
further out, the pandemic recedes, the New Mexico Taxation
and Revenue Department expects that employees will continue
to use Keeper Connection Manager to access their desktops
from home.

We were able to quickly
integrate a robust and secure
teleworking model, and adhere
to the Covid-19 stay-at-home
restrictions.
– Gabe Cisneros Jr., Infrastructure Manager
Not only does this provide employees with greater work
flexibility, but it also prepares the department for additional
lockdowns should COVID-19 resurge, or bad weather or othernatural disasters occur that prevent employees from coming tothe office.
“We’ll always want to have this tool available,” Baca said.
“Employees have realized near normal productivity and will want
this option to remain available should teleworking or after-hours
work be necessary.”

Want to learn how Keeper Connection Manager canhelp your organization provide secure access to virtual
servers, applications and desktops? Get in touch.
sales@keepersecurity.com* All references to Glyptodon Enterprise, as the product was called at the time the case study was written, have been updated toKeeper Connection Manager, which is the current name.

keepersecurity.com | keepersecurity.com/connection-manager© 2022 Keeper Security, Inc.