HIGHER EDUCATION

Universities and research institutions have unusual network security requirements compared to most commercial businesses. These organizations have massive network environments encompassing a wide range of hardware and software platforms. Huge storage arrays house data that moves through very high-speed connections.

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 governmental information that must remain classified. The presence of large numbers of computer-savvy students and staff only adds to the risk. Large pipes and lots of storage capacity keep research organizations constantly under attack from both internal and external misuse — as well as create extremely complicated environments for tracking the behavior of individual users and rapidly changing network usage demands.

Universities and research institutions need a cost-effective means to separate normal network traffic from malicious activity that indicates intentional misuse of critical host and network resources. Traditional network security solutions struggle to cover so many points of entry inside the network perimeter. The cost of securing so many individual devices and networks is prohibitive for any solution that requires software host agents to be effective. In addition, these organizations need 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.

Lancope's StealthWatch™ flow-based security and network optimization system 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. Smart universities and research institutions know what works. That's why they use StealthWatch to:

• Quickly discover and resolve unexpected demands on network resources, as well as threats and security policy violations that other solutions miss
• Centrally manage configuration, reporting and response across large, high performance networks
• Protect hosts and networks without installing software agents on individual hosts
• Visualize network health in real-time via 3D graphical representations of current and expected performance
• Integrate network security operations into broader network management initiatives