StealthWatch Monitors and Protects Higher Education Institutions
Case Studies:
- GLR deploys StealthWatch to gain visibility across high-speed internal and virtual network
- StealthWatch Addresses Higher Education’s Need for Greater Network Control and Security
Colleges and universities face unique challenges when it comes to network performance and security due to their massive networks, open, widely distributed computing environments and tech-savvy users. This fast, open transfer of information underpins the collaboration necessary for scientific exploration to flourish. And yet, these same institutions often work with secret data, proprietary trade secrets or government information that must remain classified.
Educational institutions must provide the ample network availability, openness and performance needed to support tens of thousands of users and a wide range of applications while still protecting assets and data from security and privacy compromises. They must also be able to maintain high levels of application performance to support student services such as online applications, class registration and financial aid on a 24/7 basis.
Lancope’s StealthWatch System unifies flow-based security, network and application performance monitoring to streamline workflows and provide more comprehensive visibility and protection across physical and virtual networks. Leveraging NetFlow and sFlow from existing routers and switches, StealthWatch eliminates network blind spots and reduces total network and security management costs. The system is scalable to meet the needs of even the largest networks, analyzing up to 3.0 million flows per second.
How does StealthWatch help?
- Demonstrates compliance with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) — which helps protect institutions from multimillion dollar lawsuits, while protecting the privacy and academic freedom of the students. Discover how StealthWatch Identifies Illegal File Sharing Activity and Responsible Users.
- Compares actual network behavior to expected traffic patterns to quickly identify unexpected demands on the network, as well as automatically mitigate internal attacks and misuse that traditional security solutions miss
- Provides real-time visibility into current operations in order to understand how individual users affect network resources, and how those changing usage patterns impact both short- and long-term resource planning
- Provides application awareness to support the high performance of key technologies such as Banner and PeopleSoft for student services
- Assists with PCI compliance through constant, comprehensive monitoring and advanced features such as application and identity awareness
- Centrally manages configuration, reporting and response across large, high-performance networks — alleviating the cost of securing many individual devices and networks
- Protects hosts and networks without installing software agents on individual hosts
- Visualizes network health in real-time via 3D graphical representations of current and expected performance
- Integrates network security operations into broader network management initiatives
Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam (GLR) College Deploys
StealthWatch
Challenges: To increase visibility and traffic inspection, respect student privacy and keep costs down. The university was hampered by existing firewall technology and embedded IDS/IPS that could only inspect a portion of network traffic and did not provide visibility into GLR's high-speed internal and virtual network.
Solution: The StealthWatch System
Benefits: StealthWatch delivered visibility into GLR's Internet gateway traffic without requiring hardware upgrades, resulting in visibility across GLR's high-speed internal and virtual network, faster time to resolution, automated mitigation and minimal administrative burden.
