Tales from our helpdesk: website blocked abroad

telanova: the outsourced IT team that feels like your own

Providing advice, consultancy, helpdesk, monitoring and maintenance, updates, upgrades, security: all the things your in-house team would do, but better and at a fraction of the cost and hassle.

Tales from our helpdesk: website blocked abroad

Due to the pandemic a staff member at one of our customers was stuck in Germany and called our helpdesk with a major issue they were experiencing. Part of their job role is keeping abreast of industry specific research for which they pay a large subscription fee to access a particular website. But when they accessed the site in Germany they got this error:

“Access Denied - you are not authorized to access this site from outside the UK”

There are a couple of technical ways to get round this kind of region block:

  1. Connect back to a device in the UK (via remote desktop, TeamViewer etc) and then access the website - Unfortunately this customer did not have any spare devices in the UK that could be used.
  2. Use a VPN provider (like people use to stream US Netflix) - Among numerous other issues, this would risk the provider blocking their whole business.

Before trying a technical solution we suggested that they first contact the website provider to see if there were any other options. After explaining the situation the service provider created a separate account under the German wing of the site free of charge! A much better outcome than any technical solution.

If you would like a helpdesk that gives sound, practical IT advice, not just techie solutions.

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