Literature

Education Case Studies

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."

St Mary's School - 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."