When it comes to network security, most of us immediately think about governments, hospitals and commercial enterprises. But educational institutions face the same network security challenges that modern businesses face every day.

Businesses may offer remote and guest network access to a subset of employees and partners, but universities and other educational organizations may have hundreds of faculty and staff and thousands of students accessing networks from dorm rooms, classrooms and off-campus housing. With all the 'unknown' devices logging on to school networks, Network Admission Control (NAC) is becoming an obvious tool-of-choice for securing educational networking environments.

There are many good reasons for educational institutions to consider NAC. For starters, NAC detects, isolates and cleans computers that don't meet an institution's security standards—a scenario made even more important when students log into the campus network with their own laptops. NAC also defines groups of users and puts boundaries around what they can access as a way to reduce network threats. Finally, NAC solutions—particularly appliance-based approaches—offer a straightforward implementation, even for large-scale deployments, minimizing management overhead without slowing down a busy network used by thousands of users.

While NAC is a natural fit for education, there are other security solutions that work well in this environment too. We hope you'll enjoy these informative articles about network security in educational institutions.

As always, if you have questions, please be in touch.

Happy Holidays!
Pat Donnellan, CEO

Computer education has become an important part of elementary and high school curriculum. It prepares students for careers in IT, office administration, academia, or graphic design. In fact, almost every job now requires some computer knowledge.

Though computer education is better than ever, the Cyber Security Industry Alliance says more can be done to teach young computer users about IT security. Even elementary school students need a basic understanding of computer safety maintenance.

Schools can play a role in teaching young computer users not to open files from strangers, how to install anti-virus software, how to password protect their computers, and how to recognize spam and online scams.

Some basic cybersecurity education in schools could go a long way in creating a new generation of security-aware computer users.

Ensuring that classrooms and computer labs have the most up-to-date software is easier said than done when most schools have hundreds of computers spread out over multiple classrooms. Maintaining software on all those machines requires time and money—luxuries not every district can afford.

Abilene Independent School District in Texas, a district with 16 elementary schools, five middle schools, three high schools and two early childhood programs, put an IT solution in place that gives thousands of students and staff better access to e-learning and educational software applications. The solution was to install AEP Networks' AEP Netilla Security Platform (NSP) a Secure Sockets Layer VPN.

Abilene has found that the best result from using AEP's SSL VPN solution is the time saved by not having to install and upgrade software on individual machines. Before the NSP, they installed and maintained software on every PC in the school district. Now, they deliver software to classroom computers via the Internet, saving hundreds of hours.

The district calculated that using an SSL VPN will save up to $875,000 in tech support costs over a five-year period. According the school district, without the SSL VPN solution they would need up to five more technical support staff to keep all the computers up and running. Now, they're seeing significant savings from reducing support staff requirements.

eWebUniversity provides post-secondary institutions, like San Jose State University and California Polytechnic San Louis Obisbo, with Internet-based solutions for learning and training programs. To take advantage of the reach and scale of the web, eWebUniversity needed a robust security back-bone that could traverse institutional and corporate firewalls without any network-related roadblocks.

eWebUniversity installed the AEP SmartGate application-layer security gateway to achieve secure, large-scale information exchange over the web. SmartGate uses fine-grained access controls, strong user authentication and end-to-end 256-bit AES encryption to make sure that user and learning environments are protected behind both the customer and eWebUniversity's firewalls.

"AEP's technology provides an ideal security backbone for the Virtual Training Center to provide a secure way of holding synchronous eTraining sessions," said Ash Vaidya at eWebUniversity.

AEP SmartGate offers all the essential elements for secure information sharing over the Internet in a single, easy to deploy product suite. With SmartGate, you can securely exchange information with employees, customers and business partners over any IP-based infrastructure.

AEP SmartGate—an application layer gateway—scales impressively from small deployments to many tens of thousands of users, and is the only VPN certified by Hughes for securing satellite links. By employing a federated identity model, SmartGate allows organizations to share information with trusted third parties across organizational boundaries in a timely and secure manner, seamlessly and easily.

SmartGate also provides a framework for strong two-factor user authentication, 256-bit AES data encryption, fine-grained access control, event logging, and self-provisioning online registration for user enrollment and token distribution.

SC Magazine calls SmartGate, "easy to install and administer... really imaginative... without any major weaknesses. A very innovative solution."