October 2011 – Authored by John Wagley, the case study on Colorado State University discusses how CSU implemented SafeConnect to quickly identify and authenticate new devices while also benefitting from the product’s capability to give administrators flexible security and other controls. Other benefits to the easy to install product include a dramatic decline in malware infections and a reduction in help desk calls.
TAMPA, FL – October 18, 2011 – Impulse Point, provider of the industry’s most scalable and easiest to deploy and maintain Network Access Control (NAC) solution, today announced that American University has selected Impulse Point’s SafeConnect NAC to replace Cisco’s Clean Access NAC to expand and secure its network capabilities.
American University implemented Cisco Clean Access (CCA) in 2005 to combat the outbreak of viruses (such as Slammer and Blaster) dramatically impacting colleges and universities around the country. In 2009, the University began a network redesign and upgrade effort including a move to leverage CCA’s out-of-band feature to provide an enhanced network experience for its faculty, staff, and students. At the completion of this work, along with a long history of ongoing troubleshooting and maintenance, it was determined that CCA would not meet the University’s future requirements for efficient daily administration of NAC, competitive pricing, expedient delivery of third party updates, and expanded features.
“We wanted to be able to go beyond the base feature set in CCA, however as our security model matured and we configured CCA to meet our new standards; moving past “vanilla” impacted our end users and created circuitous support problems,” said Cathy Hubbs, chief information security officer, American University.
October 1, 2011 – The proliferation of laptops, tablets, and smartphones on campus challenges higher ed IT departments to balance network protection with a culture of openness. In today’s consumerized IT environment, the line between personal and IT-controlled devices has blurred. The typical user has four devices that function interchangeably for business and personal tasks.
The article by Vanessa Hua discusses how the University of Rhode Island is implementing SafeConnect and introduced a WPA2 secure wireless network for students, faculty and staff.
TAMPA, FL – June 10, 2011 – Impulse Point, provider of the industry’s most scalable and easiest to deploy and maintain Network Access Control (NAC) solution, will host a presentation at the ISTE Annual Conference to help K-12 schools learn to better handle the growing trend of students bringing personally-owned mobile devices onto school-run networks.
Many school systems are now incorporating personally-owned mobile devices such as laptops, iPads, tablets, and smartphones into the learning experience and as a way to address one-to-one computing mandates within tightened budgetary constraints. The presentation, “Securing Personal Devices on Your Network,” (scheduled for Monday June 27, at 2:00 pm EST in the ISTE Technology Infrastructure Pavilion) addresses many of the security challenges facing schools and district administrators as they execute these “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) programs. Attendees will learn how to successfully implement a truly secure network and manage the onslaught of personally-owned mobile devices in an advantageous way. This session is important for any educational institution considering allowing personally-owned computing devices access to their school’s network.
“The decision to authorize a BYOD policy is a significant one and should not be taken lightly. Administrators need to understand how to cost-effectively manage the network authorization as well as the security posture of all personally-owned computing devices throughout a distributed school district environment,” said Dennis Muley, president of Impulse Point.
TAMPA, FL – May 19, 2011 – Impulse Point, provider of the industry’s most scalable and easiest to deploy and maintain Network Access Control (NAC) solution announced the appointment of Tim Evans as vice president of sales. After one of the best years in its history, Impulse Point further positions itself for continued growth with this appointment. In 2010, Impulse Point experienced significant year-to-year revenue growth of 95% and accomplished its fourth straight year of maintaining cash-flow positive status.
Impulse Point attributed its rapid growth to continued acceptance within larger higher education Institutions and accelerated displacements of alternative NAC providers. Colleges and universities are replacing their existing NAC solutions for enhanced end-user experience, reduced help desk support calls, increased reliability and availability, the ability to scale enterprise-wide, managed support services, and a lower total cost of ownership. Impulse Point is also benefiting from the experience gained in securing personally-owned student devices within higher education to address the current surge in “Bring Your Own Device” (aka BYOD) initiatives within the K12 Education industry sector.
TAMPA, FL -May 4, 2011 – Impulse Point, provider of the industry’s most scalable and easiest to deploy and maintain Network Access Control (NAC) solutions, today announced that Bethel School District will adopt Impulse Point SafeConnect to ensure its Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policy is successful. Bethel has implemented this policy to enhance student learning, allow students to use the devices they want to use such as iPads, and meet budget constraints that would make it impossible for the school to provide each student with a school-owned device. While addressing key trends in education – mobile learning, online and blended learning, and e-textbooks and digital content – BYOD policies also can open the network to vulnerability if not handled correctly. SafeConnect will enable students to use unmanaged devices for learning and secure Bethel School District’s wireless network throughout the district.
The BYOD trend to enrich learning in K-12 environments is gaining momentum nationwide with much support from parents and students. Project Tomorrow, a national education nonprofit group, reports that 60-70 percent of parents of K-12 students would be willing to buy a mobile device to support learning. And 56 percent of high school students say that it would make it easier to learn if they would be allowed to use their own mobile device.
TAMPA, FL – April 26, 2011 – Impulse Point, provider of the industry’s most scalable and easiest to deploy and maintain Network Access Control (NAC) solutions, today announced its partnership with Cloudpath Networks. Cloudpath’s XpressConnect is now offered with Impulse Point’s SafeConnect Network Access Control (NAC) Version 5.1 solution. The benefit to customers is the ability to provide a simple, one-step on-ramping process for securing a wide array of mobile computing devices, including Apple iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch), Android, Windows, Mac and Ubuntu devices. The combination of XpressConnect and SafeConnect accelerates deployment time, reduces help desk support costs, and improves the registration experience for “Bring-Your-Own-Device” (BYOD) users.
TAMPA, FL – March 28, 2011 – Impulse Point, provider of the industry’s most scalable and easiest to deploy and maintain Network Access Control (NAC) solutions, today announced that Lexington County School District One (Lexington One), in Lexington County South Carolina, selected Impulse Point’s SafeConnect . Lexington One recently began a new “one-to-one” technology initiative that will place a new laptop in the hands of all grade 9-12 high school students in the district. SafeConnect ensures a secure network for all students, faculty, guests, labs and devices and therefore the success of this program.
Lexington One serves more than 22,000 K-12 students and 3,000 staff and faculty in 31 locations, and remains one of the fastest-growing school districts in South Carolina. The personal computing initiative brought increased challenges to an IT department already managing close to 10,000 computers district-wide. This new initiative meant that Lexington One’s IT staff would need to nearly double its support and enforce security measures for an additional 7,000 computers in the hands of students.
Read the full Lexington One case study
TAMPA, FL – March 7, 2011 – Impulse Point, award-winning provider of network access control solutions for the world’s most complex, dynamic and scalable networks, today announced that Northern Arizona University has chosen Impulse Point SafeConnect to replace its installation of Cisco Clean Access. The new deployment of Impulse Point SafeConnect now delivers to the university enhanced security, reduced help desk support calls and greatly reduced NAC administration requirements for its IT staff.
“Impulse Point has exceeded my expectations,” said John Campbell, director of academic computing, Northern Arizona University. “I’ve worked with a lot of vendors, and I’m hard to please. But I’ve been very, very happy, not only with the strategic design of this solution, but also with the deployment and the response that we get anytime we need help. The combination of SafeConnect software on Dell hardware is performing extremely well for us.”
January 6, 2011 – When it came time to upgrade the authentication system in 2008, Albin-Hill decided to look for an alternative. Three options were evaluated by her IT team, which chose the SafeConnect network access control system for what would hopefully end the school’s 7-year-long struggle with network security.
TAMPA, FL – December 17, 2010 -The entertainment industry this month marked another chapter in its ongoing effort to prevent illegal sharing of copyrighted material on college and university campuses. In a letter from its legal team, the Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA) notified school presidents of their obligations under the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) to reduce illicit peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing on campus.
For schools seeking help with HEOA compliance, the SafeConnect network access control (NAC) solution from Impulse Point provides a comprehensive resolution for P2P file sharing concerns.
SafeConnect can play a strategic role in any institution’s response to the HEOA mandates, which went into effect earlier this year, and require that colleges and universities implement:
Read More About HEOA Mandates and How SafeConnect Can Help
TAMPA, FL – November 17, 2010- Eastern Illinois University relies on Impulse Point’s SafeConnect to ensure that the University’s evolving network is reliable and secure. Impulse Point is the leading provider of network access control (NAC) solutions for large, diverse environments.
Since EIU switched to Impulse Point SafeConnect from Cisco Clean Access a year ago, the IT department has experienced positive feedback from students, faculty and staff. Prior to the switch, end users had difficulty correcting security problems on their own and contacted IT even though they were informed why they were being blocked by the network. Now, if a device seeking access to the network is out of compliance with the school’s IT security policies, the user is presented with easy-to-understand guidance to correct the problem, enabling students and other users to self-resolve most issues. Consequently, help desk calls have been reduced by 70 percent.
To learn more about how other schools have benefited, please visit the Success Stories page.
TAMPA, FL – November 4, 2010- Keystone College relies on Impulse Point’s SafeConnect to ensure that the college’s network is reliable and secure. Impulse Point is the leading provider of NAC solutions for large and complex environments. Prior to working with Impulse Point, Keystone College IT was plagued with misconfigured machines, and other devices non-compliant with the school’s IT policies, flooding the network with viruses and other problems. Although the school never had a case of a malicious user disabling the network, students in residence halls were unknowingly creating many issues that were consuming tremendous IT resources to resolve. Keystone found Impulse Point through peer recommendations on the EDUCAUSE Security List Serve and selected the SafeConnect solution because it could seamlessly integrate with wireless access provided by Aruba Networks.
Southwestern Oregon Community College discusses why they chose SafeConnect NAC to protect their network. Read the article in Community College Week
TAMPA, FL – October 25, 2010- Impulse Point, award-winning provider of network access control solutions for the world’s most complex, dynamic and scalable networks, today announced that a growing number of major U.S. universities are transitioning to SafeConnect from Cisco and Bradford Networks NAC solutions. A few of these universities include Northern Arizona University, The Master’s College, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and Saginaw Valley State University. They selected Impulse Point for the following reasons: enhanced end user experience, reduced help desk support calls, increased reliability and availability, ability to scale enterprise-wide, managed support services and lower total cost of ownership.
TAMPA, FL – OCTOBER 6, 2010 — Impulse Point, leading provider of network access control solutions for the world’s most complex, dynamic and scalable networks, will sponsor a reception on Wednesday, October 13 at EDUCAUSE 2010 in Anaheim, California.
The right combination of wireless network hardware and network access control software has freed the IT crew at this small college to focus on user demands other than access problems. Read the article in Campus Technology!
Impulse Point, a company whose technology provides network access control (NAC), has introduced an upgrade of its SafeConnect service that regulates access to wireless networks. Impulse, which began serving college campuses where students seek wireless connectivity for myriad devices, is now selling to the enterprise markets as employees in the workplace seek to do the same. Read the Network Computing article!
TAMPA, FL – SEPTEMBER 27, 2010 – Impulse Point, provider of the most scalable network access control (NAC) solution for complex, diverse enterprise networks, today announced the latest version of its flagship product, SafeConnect 5.0.
SafeConnect enables organizations such as UCLA, Northern Arizona University, University of Florida, and Mid-Florida Credit Union to easily manage end user authentication, guest management, anti-virus, anti-spyware, Microsoft security patches, P2P file sharing, and custom policies. New features in SafeConnect 5.0, such as policy enforcement integration with Aruba Wireless Controllers, enhanced endpoint profiling device recognition, and improved guest access sponsorship capabilities allow Impulse Point to address the evolving challenges of pervasive mobile computing within large organizations.
TAMPA, FL – JUNE 15, 2010 – Impulse Point announced today that Info Security Products Guide, the industry’s leading information security research and advisory guide, has named Impulse Point as a winner of the 2010 Best Deployment Scenario Awards in the Security Solution for Education category. This prestigious award recognizes security vendors with advanced, ground-breaking security solutions that are helping set the bar higher for others in all areas of information security. The SafeConnect Network Access Control solution was selected based on real world solution deployments that are making the most positive impact on security in today’s highly sophisticated and blended attacks environment.
ROUND ROCK, TX – APRIL 12, 2010 – Impulse Point, provider of the most scalable network access control (NAC) solution for large enterprise networks announces that SafeConnect is now available in Canada through the Dell Direct and PartnerDirect Sales Distribution Channels.
As a strategic member of Impulse Point’s PartnerConnect program, Dell provides its partners and customers throughout the U.S., and now Canada, the ability to quickly integrate a highly-scalable network access control (NAC) solution into vendor-diverse environments without the need to upgrade or manipulate their existing network infrastructure.
TAMPA, FL – APRIL 5, 2010 – Impulse Point, provider of the most scalable network access control (NAC) solution for large enterprise networks announced today that SafeConnect supports the Apple iPad and that updates were pushed to all customers within 48 hours of release of the new endpoint device.
As the NAC industry’s first and only NAC-as-a-Service (NaaS) provider, Impulse Point is responsible for updating the SafeConnect product for all its customers on a timely basis. Our industry leading Service Level Agreement (SLA) for new devices, operating system, and endpoint security software is 24 to 48 hours, as compared to other NAC providers who struggle with maintaining 24-48+ “day” update cycles.
“We profiled and tested the new iPad within hours of its actual release on Saturday,” states Max Garcia, Chief Technology Officer for Impulse Point. “The update was pushed out to a number of selected customers over the weekend and to the remainder of our customer base through normal change management procedures by end of the day on Monday, April 5.”
KEENE, NH – FEBRUARY 1, 2010 – Impulse Point, provider of the most scalable network access control (NAC) solution for large higher education enterprise networks, and Keene State College announced today that SafeConnect has successfully been deployed to provide endpoint security policy management for the College’s wireless and residential networks.
Keene State chose Impulse Point’s SafeConnect NAC to replace Cisco Clean Access (CCA) after using CCA for five years and closely reviewing other NAC products. Among the requirements considered was the product’s ease of use and the capacity to help realign the workload of a limited IT staff. “Keene State’s IT department is continually focused on strategic technology projects. We simply could not have a NAC solution that necessitated any additional support staff to run on a day to day basis,” state Laura Seraichick, CIO for Keene State College. “Not only was SafeConnect installed, running and deployed in record time, but we don’t have to dedicate additional IT resources to managing it.”
Impulse Point’s network access control subject matter experts regularly speak with journalists and at conferences on a range of topics for general and highly technical audiences. To inquire about network access control, schedule an interview, or discuss a speaking engagement, please contact Jeff Hodnett at jhodnett@hodnettgroup.com or at 978.766.0270
Note: Press with same-day interview requests should call our Headquarters Office directly at 1-863-802-3738 to be connected to our marketing department weekdays between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. EST. Upon calling, please identify yourself as a media representative with an urgent assignment.
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