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Bridgend College delivers “University quality” service with Lightspeed Systems
As networks become more complex, and the range of internet services expand, the need for organisations to become more vigilant is ever greater. The enormous benefit the internet brings has to be balanced against the potential dangers of inappropriate use.
The College
Bridgend College in South Wales was established 80 years ago as a Technical Institute with its roots in the mining industry. Originally providing evening classes to promote the welfare of Miners, it quickly evolved into a day school providing technical education to boys in the age range 13 to 15. After the Second World War, the college expanded, underwent several transformations and in 1975 became the Bridgend College of Technology. Today the College spans five campuses, employs 850 staff and provides over 500 courses to more than 15,000 students.
The Challenge
Leighton Spurgeon, IT Services Manager and Mike Gallivan, IT Services Technical Manager of Bridgend College were concerned that the increasing scale of the College’s IT
facilities was leading to a situation that was becoming out of hand. Leighton explains, “For several years we simply had no visibility whatsoever as to who was doing what on our
network and no insight on the traffic flows. Not only had our network become unmanageable, but we were also
completely open to abuse”. Leighton and his team deployed several products to try to remedy this situation but with
limited success. “Our i-Critical system just couldn’t scale up to the performance and level of monitoring we needed for a
growing network of over 1,450 Mac and Windows PC’s.”
The Solution
Bridgend’s dilemma is not unique amongst schools and
colleges and, whilst containing the problem as best they could, they remained optimistic that there had to be a better
solution. The team kept a close eye on the technology
market with particular focus on the market leading so called“best of breed” solutions. Bridgend’s product selection
process had already moved on to a full evaluation of Websense but when Leighton visited the BETT show he became aware of Total Traffic Control from Lightspeed Systems.
Total Traffic Control was eye catching because it seemed to address all of Bridgend’s issues in a single comprehensive solution. Leighton’s reaction was “I need to try this software to see if it does everything it claims to do!” Bridgend College
therefore included TTC in its technology review.
The Benefits
Bridgend College undertakes franchised work for some
Universities so Internet browsing performance was a key issue. It was imperative that the college deliver the same quality of service that the students would expect from a
University. After installing Total Traffic Control in its web
filtering role it was immediately apparent that performance was impressive. Total Traffic Control’s powerful packet processing engine was delivering a much higher
throughput across all the Bridgend sites and the usual daily
performance complaints stopped overnight! As well as
impressive performance, Total Traffic Control’s extensive range of reports gave Bridgend College the visibility into
network activity that they really needed. Michael Gallivan, IT Services Technical Manager at Bridgend College
commented that “we can see exactly what users are doing on the network and can use that information to establish
usage policies and bandwidth management rules based on real as opposed to perceived areas of concern. The
management console is very intuitive and easy-to-use. In a few clicks you can get detailed information about what is happening, how much traffic is being generated, by whom,
and so on.”
Full network integration (Active Directory, e-Directory or LDAP) allows granular policies to be set by users, groups, organisational units, IP address ranges and individual computers enabling implementation of appropriate controls across all age groups. Michael continues “we are now able to set different policies for staff, Higher Education students, Further Education students and 14-16 year old school children who all attend courses at this college.”
As Bridgend College deploys further features of Total Traffic Control such as Spam filtering, email journaling and end-point security, Leighton and his team expect to realise considerable cost savings over current solutions as well as reduce the management overhead usually attributed to keeping the network functioning well.
Leighton concludes “The bottom line is that Total Traffic Control is a brilliant product - in my 13 years in IT working in both Private and Public sector, this is the best piece of software I’ve come across! It gives you unprecedented vision and control of your network activity and I couldn’t endorse the product more. ”
Havering Sixth Form College saves over £10,000 with Lightspeed Systems
Schools, colleges and universities are becoming increasingly reliant on IT but as a consequence they are spending an escalating amount of time and money on security solutions to protect both the students and the institution from a number of threats including viruses, spam and unsuitable web content.
Historically, Havering Sixth Form College has addressed these threats by using a range of disparate security solutions from a number of different suppliers. However, since opening in 2001, the college has doubled in size to over 2000 students and found that these different solutions were becoming costly to operate and very difficult to manage.
Pat McConalogue, Head of IT at Havering Sixth Form College, comments, “With the use of disparate, incompatible solutions, we could not get a clear view of network activity. Each summary report was presented in a different format and would often be limited in the information it provided, extra work was then required by the IT team to interpret and correlate this data. Furthermore, using a number of different solutions was proving to be unnecessarily expensive. TTC has enabled us to save not only a huge amount of man hours across the IT team but an estimated £10,000 by consolidating products.”
Since deploying TTC Havering has already gained an invaluable insight into its network activity. The College found that over 80% of its past email was spam which is now blocked by TTC. This discovery alone has freed up a significant amount of the IT staff’s time and enables them to focus on more strategic work.
Neil Siveter, Senior IT Technician at Havering Sixth Form College, confirms, “TTC now provides a number of comprehensive reports detailing the amount of spam and viruses it has blocked and detected, this now gives us a full view of the network activity from a single source.”
100 Year old school takes modern action against online threats
St Mary’s School in Wiltshire has implemented Lightspeed Systems Europe’s flagship product Total Traffic Control (TTC) to protect their girls from online bullying and unsuitable internet sites. With the wide use of the internet by pupils within schools, education authorities are having to take action to protect their pupils from unsuitable internet sites and the emergence of online bullying. St Mary’s School, Calne, Wiltshire has tackled this escalating problem by heightening their network security measures with TTC, to monitor, control and secure both their internal wireless networks and internet connections.
Both a boarding school and day school of around 300 girls aged 11-18 St Mary’s School was founded in 1873 and still treasures its traditional values, which complement the modern curriculum they follow developing successful young women for the 21st century. The curriculum now welcomes the use of the internet as a modern research technique, but with the vast amount of uncontrolled information available to its users, schools need to implement a huge amount of security measures to protect their pupils. Furthermore, with the emergence of instant messaging and social networking sites such as MSN Messenger and MySpace, online bullying is becoming increasingly perceptible, adding to the threats surrounding the internet.
With the use of laptops by the pupils who board at St Mary’s, online bullying was a threat the school did not want to see becoming endemic. Therefore TTC was added to their existing security measures in order to enable each individual user to be monitored and protected from such threats with the use of content filtering. Matthew Rus, IT Manager at St Mary’s school comments “With the ever increasing use of laptops and wireless networks by the pupils, we as a school have an obligation to protect the girls from harm; whether it’s the use of unsuitable sites or online bullying. With the implementation of TTC we can achieve this.”
Matthew adds, “TTC not only enables us to monitor the sites accessed across our network but allows us to monitor individual users. As well as being able to set limits according to each different user, we can stipulate the time they can access the internet and indeed what they can access.”
Earnie Kramer, Technical Director, Lightspeed Systems “Students are now using the internet as a source of communication rather than just a research tool which adds a number of new security threats. We are delighted to be able to offer TTC to schools such as St Mary’s in order to help combat these threats and provide a safe, flexible educational environment.”
Dauntsey’s School imposes Internet Control with Lightspeed
With an increasing proportion of the National Curriculum requiring Internet access during lessons, many schools are struggling to impose control over pupils’ in-lesson activity. From access to inappropriate web sites to IM led
distraction, maintaining focus and discipline is a growing problem.
Dauntsey's, which is located near Devizes in Wiltshire, was founded in 1542 and is one of the most popular fully
co-educational schools in the country, with some 770 boys and girls, aged between 11 and 18.
Mark Braby, Network Administrator of Dauntsey’s School, comments, “Obviously while it is very important for pupils to use the Internet to support the teaching process, the school has to be very careful about controlling access to specific content. As with any school, Dauntsey’s has pupils who wish to push the boundaries – it is essential to be able to monitor and control that activity.”
Braby comments that “with TTC, Dauntsey’s does not need to police pupils’ online behaviour every hour. The depth and accuracy of site categorisation provided by Lightspeed Systems is excellent and, using reports, the school has immediate visibility of any attempt by a pupil to access an inappropriate site. The reports also show trends in Internet use and behaviour which is very useful, especially for the school’s management team.”
Dauntsey’s is now using TTC to monitor, control and secure its internal network and internet connection – and plans to utilise the tool’s email filtering and spam protection in the near future. Braby adds, “By using a single product to handle the whole range of Internet security issues, Dauntsey’s can reduce its IT management overheads and realise significant savings.”
Royal School For the Deaf Signs On!
The Royal School for the Deaf & Communications Disorders (RSDCD) was established by local business leaders in 1825 to meet the needs of deaf children in the Manchester area. The RSDCD moved to its current location in Cheadle Hulme in 1956 and is today running a special school for ages 2-19 and a college for the 19-25 age group. The school and college cater for day and residential students with complex learning needs and communication difficulties providing high-standard care, education and specialist services to promote an individual's participation and success in the community.
The RSDCD operates and provides services to its students 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Extensive use is made of technology to assist the learning experience and students are granted access to computers at anytime during the day and night. As IT Manager for the RSDCD, it is Mike Pearn's responsibility to safeguard its vulnerable students from inappropriate content on the web while also monitoring student and staff activity to ensure that everyone adheres to acceptable usage policies. However, the problem for Mike was that the solution they had been using didn't give the School the level of detailed monitoring that was necessary to fulfil this objective. Mike comments, "the software I have been using until now had limited reporting which gave me little insight into what students were doing on the Internet. This is the main reason why I felt compelled to look for a more granular solution."
Mike attended the BETT show and subsequently shortlisted various security software solutions including Total Traffic Control from Lightspeed Systems. Mike undertook a rigorous evaluation of all these solutions before finally selecting a product. Mike explains "Total Traffic Control was the one solution that ticked all the boxes and easily met our expectations. The school needs to monitor student and staff behaviour in a proactive way to detect dangerous activity before serious damage can be done. Total Traffic Control gives us peace of mind as I can now monitor activities such as search engine queries or Google images and take appropriate steps when e-safety issues arise".
Until the advent of Total Traffic Control, the School had been using a set of six different products to cover areas ranging from Web Content Filtering and Malware Protection to Spam Management and Monitoring. This eclectic mix was putting a lot of strain on workstations and, as Mike explains, "computers would take 5 to 10 minutes to boot causing frustrations for our students". Now that the School has implemented Total Traffic Control the whole network benefits from enhanced performance and can be administered with a single console. Mike continues "We can now focus on a single solution that does everything we want. Not only does the School now benefit from more streamlined security and administration, but it has also been able to substantially reduce year on year costs, an important benefit for a charity".
