At today’s colleges and universities, the campus network supports a growing number of research, communications, and educational functions. But with thousands of users, endpoints, and applications active at any time, campus networks are becoming increasingly difficult to protect. Academic IT professionals are constantly challenged to ensure that all devices logging onto the network are secure, to effectively identify and mitigate network attacks, and to protect limited bandwidth resources from abuse and misuse. Here are some of the common network security challenges faced by today’s colleges and universities:

#1: Diversity Challenges

IT administrators struggle to ensure the security and availability of critical network applications while maintaining the open, unfettered learning environment that academic institutions required.

#2: Expanding User Base

Administrators need new tools to distinguish between secure and unsecured endpoints and to promote responsible behavior among users.

#3: Bandwidth Issues

The rise of bandwidth-intensive P2P traffic and gaming applications demands more effective bandwidth control tools. File-sharing applications for music and movies were consuming 50 percent of campus bandwidth.

#4: Evolving Network Attacks

The tools to create and propagate network attacks have become more sophisticated and are increasingly accessible to malicious parties on and off campus. Decreasing the time to respond to an attack before it causes widespread damage.

#5: Substantial Potential Costs

A network breach results in the compromise of thousands of records. The notification effort alone can be a massive and costly undertaking.

For many colleges and universities, deploying the necessary detection and enforcement points in their networks is only one component of the total security picture. IT leaders need the ability to view, analyze and respond to information across the entire infrastructure and as a result, they need visibility from and to all points of the network, regardless of whether or not security devices exist at all these points.

To protect against both internal and external threats—and to support the existence and effectiveness of control standards—clear, comprehensive and always-accessible reports are important but not the silver bullet to address today’s growing traffic volume. Most critically, if the campus network relies on individually deployed security solutions that are not integrated into an institution-wide system, responding to any of these needs is a difficult, complex, and costly proposition.

Advanced IP Filtering For Higher Education Networks

Faced with these issues, many colleges and universities are searching for more intelligent, proactive strategies for protecting and optimizing academic networks. Advanced IP Filtering provides a suite of powerful solutions for higher education networks. Designed to support complex, open academic environments, these solutions allow colleges and universities to gain unprecedented insight into network activity, more tightly control network resources and bandwidth resources, and more effectively identify and respond to security threats.

• Advanced IP Filtering can zero in on countries, companies, networks, and IP’s which can detect, identify, prevent, filter, stop attacks, and remove wasteful traffic that other security controls cannot within a few clicks.
• Customization capabilities to stop, limit, alert, or redirect activity that is only of concern to the organization, its public internet services, and unique ports based on the country, company, networks, IP’s, or ports.
• Reducing the amount of network traffic reaching other security controls, lowers risk, logging, alerting, security burdens, to security controls.
• Unmatched performance without compromising breadth and depth of security
• Delivers and improves zero-day identification and protection.
• Provides critical insight and visibility into network activity.
• Enables Country, company, and network granular control.
• Reduces cost and complexity by eliminating unwanted volume, and threats.
• Improves and reduces bandwidth consumption.
• Leverages your existing infrastructure investments and IT expertise.

Have you implemented Advanced IP Filtering at the perimeter at your institution? Share your experience below.  {{cta(‘955588eb-9799-41ab-8347-8913a878e5e8′,’justifyright’)}}