Lexington County School District One is the largest school district in Lexington County, South Carolina in terms of both geography and student enrollment. With 31 locations, the district serves more than 22,000 K-12 students and 3,000 staff and faculty. Lexington One continues to add 500 new students on average each school year and remains one of the fastest-growing school districts in the state.
Lexington County School District One recently began a personal mobile computing technology initiative that will place a new laptop in the hands of all grade 9–12 high school students in the district. Already managing close to 10,000 computers district-wide, Lexington One’s IT staff now faced a new challenge to nearly double its support and enforce security measures for an additional 7,000 computers in the hands of students. With this large-scale deployment of computing devices, Lexington One required a more comprehensive approach to manage the onslaught of personally-managed systems requiring secure access to a highly distributed network environment – they chose Impulse Point’s SafeConnect Network Access Control solution to address this need.
Network access control (NAC) automates endpoint security compliance by continuously identifying, assessing, enforcing, and remediating computing devices before and after network access. SafeConnect NAC allows the district to prescribe and ensure compliance with basic security practices regarding anti-virus, anti-spyware, and other malware on the personal devices being brought onto the network.
Beyond this new initiative, concerns included staff PC security, guest access, introduction of new devices to the network (such as iPads, netbooks and smart phones), and numerous shared computer lab facilities in elementary and middle schools. The district required the flexibility to better secure the network with antivirus and malware protection, as well as block illegal peer-to-peer file sharing. Like most school districts throughout the country, cost was top of mind while trying to meet the demands of 21st century education with limited IT personnel.
Lexington One’s IT department began evaluating NAC vendors to meet the district’s scalability and security demands with the least amount of expense and complexity. Prohibitive costs and the added complexity of deploying a server at each of the 31 locations and district office (for a total of 32) ruled out other vendors immediately.
Lexington One soon discovered the distinct advantages of Impulse Point’s SafeConnect, including the ability to address network access control for both wired and wireless environments, the ability to isolate individual machines, and automate antivirus protection, patch updates, and peer-to-peer blocks. SafeConnect also required no additional hardware or IT resource investment other than the three original servers at the district’s office. The crucial deciding factor for Lexington One to adopt SafeConnect’s was the managed support service that provided unrivalled deployment simplicity and ease-of-use at a very affordable price point.
“Deploying SafeConnect was incredibly easy and problem-free,” said Brad Bowers, senior network engineer, Lexington One. “We received the boxes and literally 20 or 30 minutes later we were up and running. Our district was able to completely circumvent the purchase of numerous new hardware and the lengthy process and investment of client installation. No weeks of training or complicated jargon to learn. Within an hour, we were ready to go.”
SafeConnect enables the IT staff to quickly and automatically quarantine problematic devices in real time while providing staff and users with immediate feedback as to why the device is blocked and how to resolve the problem. IT staff now spends less time troubleshooting problems and individual users can follow step-by-step instructions to bring devices back into compliance with security policies. SafeConnect runs so seamlessly that many staff and faculty are unaware of the program until they receive notification of a problem.
Prior to SafeConnect, the IT staff at Lexington One was often bogged down and chasing anti-virus problems, sometimes taking up to two or three days of one staff member’s time per issue. Now the department is able to spend more time on strategic tasks at hand because SafeConnect automatically keeps the network up-to-date on all patches and anti-virus upgrades. Lexington One has found the deployment of SafeConnect problem-free. They have made only a few calls to support for questions and found the technicians very knowledgeable.
“SafeConnect is an amazing solution for K-12 school districts and the challenges we face today,” said Jeff Salters, Chief Operations Officer, Lexington One. “It doesn’t require much training or an expensive consultant to help set it up. The ease of implementation and peace of mind with a truly secure network are incredible. This is especially advantageous to educational institutions that need high-scalability security and diverse device network features, despite thinly stretched IT teams and budget concerns. It is a perfect solution for Lexington One.”
SafeConnect™ offers an easy to implement and support endpoint policy management solution that allows organizations to control access to their networks based on an end user’s compliance with security policies, while seamlessly connecting to their existing multi-vendor infrastructure. Although not required, SafeConnect is also compatible with 802.1x, providing the flexibility to quarantine users at the router, switch, or endpoint device.
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.
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