With such a large distributed student and faculty population, Berkeley County K-12 School District in South Carolina was concerned about the security threats and regulatory concerns associated with allowing non-District owned, computing devices to access their network.
Berkeley County chose Impulse Point’s SafeConnect NAC after reviewing several other NAC products. Among the requirements considered by Berkeley County School District when selecting SafeConnect was the product’s ability to easily scale to support a large number of remote sites without extensive hardware and integration requirements or prohibitive costs. The solution also had to be interoperable with the District’s Cisco network infrastructure and Novell e-Directory Single Sign-On (SSO).
SafeConnect is deployed with minimal hardware from Berkeley County’s District Headquarters location and supports 37 remote schools and 4 district offices, including more than 30,000 students and staff.
“Our biggest concern was keeping anti-virus, anti-spyware, and patches up to date. Additionally, we were concerned about the possibility of unauthorized devices being attached to our network without a reliable and consistent means of detecting and securing those devices,” states Diane Driggers, Director of Technology for Berkeley County School District. “Once SafeConnect was deployed, we were immediately able to see where problems existed and get them corrected.”
Berkeley is now able to use SafeConnect NAC to help prevent non-District owned assets from accessing the network, stopping the spread of malware. The School District is also able to control peer-to-peer file sharing and can use emergency broadcast messaging capabilities to transmit information to all or selected locations.
“It’s been a seamless experience for our users. We’re extremely happy with the product and the level of support provided by Impulse Point,” continues Jeff Winningham, Network Administrator. “Impulse Point also worked with us to customize the reporting capabilities for the District.”
“The Berkeley County School District has a very large, distributed network and they’ve done an outstanding job of phasing deployment throughout the system,” says Gen Lapham, Regional Sales Manager of Impulse Point. “Berkeley was able to install SafeConnect in a nonintrusive manner, using Single Sign-on, so that it is virtually ‘invisible’ to the managed user community. The solution is also able to provide remediation guidance for those instances where a device is not compliant with security policies.”
SafeConnect™ is supported by the NAC industry’s only proactive maintenance support offering. Impulse Point provides continuous proactive monitoring and support that includes hardware server and software problem determination and resolution, as well as upgrade protection to future software functional releases. Impulse Point prides itself on the quick, efficient, and accurate implementation of the SafeConnect NAC Solution and is available to provide personalized advice and support throughout project planning, installation, and deployment. All necessary Policy Appliance hardware, software licenses, and the following support services are included in the initial first year price of the SafeConnect solution:
The ability to maintain up-to-date support for the most current anti-virus, anti-spyware, operating system, and other endpoint security software is a major benefit of Impulse Point’s Managed Services Offering. Impulse Point owns the responsibility of identifying, supporting, and updating customers within 48 hours as a standard component of its managed support service.
The endpoint policy management capabilities shown to the right are included:
The SafeConnect solution performs both pre- and post-admission security checks in real time without any network traffic degradation. SafeConnect functions out-of-line and provides continuous security assessment and enforcement across wired, wireless, and VPN networks with no performance bottlenecks, maintenance-driven network outages, or as a single point of failure.
SafeConnect features a Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication capability that allows existing Active Directory-managed users to maintain their existing login process user experience.
The SafeConnect NAC solution helps drive a substantial reduction in help desk calls because it is intuitive and user friendly for both the end users and IT support management teams. Users not in compliance receive individualized policy notifications regarding the reason for non-compliance (e.g. out of date anti-virus protection) and are guided through the remediation process with instructions and a link to an internal or external source where the appropriate software or virus definition can be downloaded. Because the remediation process is simple and straight-forward, users follow through to regain compliance and access to the network. This results in fewer instances of non-compliance and ultimately fewer Help Desk calls.
School campuses need to quickly notify students and faculty in the event of an emergency situation. SafeConnect has the ability to broadcast an information or emergency message on-demand to everyone whose computer is authorized to access the campus network. SafeConnect can also send messages to specific devices, specific user groups (staff, faculty, students, etc.), or individual users. Notification can be made quickly and administrators can track the acknowledgements of receipt for compliance purposes.
Policy Administrators can define and change endpoint computing policies and enforcement rules by network segment or directory services policy group from a centralized policy management interface despite the number of remote or distributed locations. The solution also delivers real-time and historical policy status reporting that provides valuable insight into group or individual policy compliance to Policy Administrators and Help Desk personnel.
The following SafeConnect Endpoint Policy Management capabilities can be deployed in a phased-in approach (by IP address/range, subnet, VLAN) across wired, wireless, and VPN infrastructures.
About Berkeley County School District
The Berkeley County School District continues to invest in the best possible learning opportunities for students and the best possible working environment for employees. Our reputation is solid as a result of connecting all resources to realize the highest possible dividends. The district is committed to high performance and measured improvement. We believe in a strong academic emphasis in all grades, full day instruction at all levels and extended learning opportunities for students who need either remediation or enrichment. For more information, please visit www.berkeley.k12.sc.us
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