Sweyne Park School Upgrades to iboss Next Generation Security

Sweyne Park School upgrades to iboss next generation security to cope with BYOD, school devices and increased bandwidth demands.

 

Sweyne Park School, an academy based in Rayleigh, Essex, positions it’s “securing pupil success” ethos throughout every aspect of the school curriculum which has led to the ‘outstanding’ rating given by Ofsted and achievement of the Safeguarding Quality Mark.

Sweyne Park School BuildingAs part of Sweyne Park’s commitment to “securing pupil success”, it recently rolled out over 650 laptops, desktops & mobile devices to cater for existing students, and for the first cohort of 16 – 18 year old students at the school’s newly opened sixth form. Whilst the introduction of the multiple device types immediately began benefiting the pupils & staff, Sweyne Park’s valiant leap to provide next generation learning changed network & user demands overnight and potentially created immediate security and bandwidth issues. The school not only needed to secure the network and manage the multiple device types but also had to address the capacity gap between the little bandwidth available and large bandwidth demand.

The school has used a number of web filtering solutions over the years, including local council services and other systems from competitive vendors.

With the existing systems becoming out-dated, less reliable and the realisation of looming costs to upgrade, Sweyne Park’s IT Manager, Dan Joslin took the decision to investigate alternative web security technologies. Dan turned to Sweyne Park’s long-standing solutions provider of ICT equipment and services, Neustro Consulting because of their proven experience in education for networking & security complimented with their high level of customer support. The technical business development team at Neustro recommended iboss’ Secure Web Gateway appliance with web security, bandwidth optimisation and advanced comprehensive network reporting to Sweyne Park as it met both commercial and technical requirements above other competitive vendors.

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After product demonstrations, technical webinars and feature overviews provided by Neustro, supported by Purdicom the value added distributor of iboss in the UK, Sweyne Park wanted to test & evaluate the iboss Secure Web Gateway. With the iboss technology meeting Sweyne Park’s solution requirements in theory, the school wanted to experience the technology first hand and gain reassurance that the best solution was to be chosen.

After a hugely successful trial period, the school IT Manager Dan Joslin was keen to implement iboss as soon as possible to filter inbound and outbound web traffic of the network, to secure & manage the pupils devices not only from inappropriate websites, but from Malware, Botnets and other malicious threats whilst simultaneously optimising bandwidth to address the need for speed. iboss also met the commercial requirements of Sweyne Park which enabled the school to upgrade to next generation security.

The iboss Secure Web Gateway was installed by Neustro’s iboss accredited engineers, who were assisted by Purdicom’s authorised iboss training engineers. From the initial installation, both Neustro’s & Purdicom’s engineers adapted & fine-tuned the iboss Secure Web Gateway enabling advanced features and as the solution grew so did Sweyne’s Park’s confidence in knowing they had chosen the right ‘next generation’ network security product.

iboss gives me the confidence to encourage BYOD usage, while easily implementing the schools Acceptable Usage Policy. With the comprehensive reporting and delegated administration all in one place, it makes my life simple!

Dan Joslin – IT Manager for Sweyne Park School

The features that immediately impressed were the categorisation priorities to enable highly controllable and granular filtering, bandwidth management and the comprehensive monitoring and reporting facilities with live dashboards.

Dan Joslin immediately noticed a “massive improvement in internet speed”, through iboss bandwidth optimisation highlighting “just how much of a bottleneck the legacy proxy filtering was”. The immediate bandwidth optimisation meant Sweyne Park would not have to look at upgrading Internet capacity, which often comes with long-term contractual restrictions and large financial costs. The iboss stream-based technology acts as a transparent bridge that sits across all 131,070 inbound & outbound data channels simply looking for anomalies, intrusions & infected data without stopping and searching each data packet, which slows Internet speeds. When switched on, iboss’ technology also immediately detected a number of infected laptops & desktops, which enabled IT Manager, Dan Joslin to proactively and rapidly respond. Moving forward Dan Joslin has empowered the school network staff around him to act proactively and respond swiftly by making use of the delegated administration capabilities to assign specific duties amongst the ICT team to spread the workload and increase responsiveness.

 

 

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With an enormously successful implementation of iboss’ Web Security technology, Sweyne Park looks forward to further complimenting their network security by rolling out iboss’ MobileEther (MDM) & mobile security in the near future to secure and manage the 650+ devices, encouraging a ‘worry-free’ school-wide BYOD program. Dan explains, “iboss gives me the confidence to encourage BYOD usage, while easily implementing the schools Acceptable Usage Policy. With the comprehensive reporting and delegated administration all in one place it makes my life simple!” With so many mobile devices using the network, protection against advanced threats and unwanted applications is a major concern. Dan recognises the need for a stronger defence against data theft, so he will also be implementing the powerful iboss FireSphere functionality as well as the CISO dashboard, which gives him real time visibility into threats on the network.