As August races to a close and the weather starts to cool down, summer camps have closed their doors, white clothes are packed away and parents rejoice because
it’s time to head back to school. The staff members at schools and universities all over the country begin to prepare for the influx of students by mowing the lawns, cleaning up the lockers and washing the windows—and the IT team is no different.
For the IT staff at secondary and higher education establishments, welcoming back students, teachers and staff for another school year is a large undertaking, especially with the number of technology advancements made in the last few years. Just a decade ago, students visited computer labs to finish their homework or work on research projects, and that provided the IT department with a high level of control. Nowadays, students insist on utilizing their own laptops, tablets and smartphones and access the school’s network to watch YouTube videos, browse Facebook, download music and more—things that can potentially slow and threaten the network, but are nownecessary to the learning process.
Given these challenges, we work with IT staff at a number of schools to ensure the traffic runs smoothly and efficiently through their networks. One of our products, Cymtec Sentry, instantly provides IT managers with cost-effective tools by rolling several different capabilities such as traffic visibility, bandwidth shaping, user enforcement and containment of network threats into a single device. Here are some of the benefits of Cymtec Sentry as it relates to schools:
- Prioritization: Just as students need to have it to get their work done in a timely manner, prioritization is a key benefit of Cymtec Sentry. Allocating and prioritizing bandwidth is critical in IT so that applications receive the service they need to perform.
- Knowing what’s happening: Being able to monitor what’s moving in and out of the network is key to better and more efficient management of performance.
- Availability: Just as educators are always “on-call” for their students, the network needs to be up and running at all times.
- Contain threats: Like schoolteachers, the IT team wants to keep the bullies out by stopping malicious traffic from entering the network and consuming resources. With so many devices using the network, it’s inevitable that spyware, malware, BotNet and worm activity will occur, but the key is to be alerted and to stop them before they spread.
While it might be too late to make major IT changes ahead of the coming school year planning is always the key to success and these tips will help ensure the proper framework going forward.
