Securing Educational Organizations While Enabling Secure Access in Online Learning Environments

Protecting Educators, Students, and Resources in Complex Digital Environments

Can You Rely on Your Data Center Access Security?

Educational organizations are a top target for cyberattacks. It is the third most common area of focus for hackers and cybercriminals, behind financial and health care institutions. EDUCAUSE named information security as the top IT issue of the year for the fourth year in a row for schools.

Data Breach Leading to Theft or Compromise

The problem is getting worse. The number of lost, stolen or compromised student data records went up 164% in the first six months of 2017 compared to the last half of 2016, Campus Technology reports. Schools struggle with meeting Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) by keeping all endpoints up-to-date with host-checker.

Network-Wide Ransomware Attack

Education institutions have offered attackers little resistance to identity and financial theft. At the same time, organizations are embracing new digital learning initiatives, including personalized learning, learning management systems, virtual classrooms, mobile learning, augmented/virtual reality, further use of cloud resources and have to cater to students who are always on the leading edge of new—and often non-secure—computer resources.

Financial Theft from Unauthorized Access

Educational organizations need to offer broad access, accommodate an ever-widening variety of devices and deal with numerous networks, highly distributed computing environments, new apps and various cloud-based assets. Key to such diverse challenges is the ability to have secure access with consistent and appropriate security policies across all users, devices, applications, networks and locations.

Protect Your Data Center in a Zero-Trust World

Pulse Secure provides a comprehensive way for schools and educational organizations to secure their environments while accommodating constantly changing dynamics as well as pursuing new digital learning initiatives. Our security framework controls access to the central office network, individual schools and on-prem or cloud-data centers based on user, role, device, location, time, network and application, as well as endpoint security state. It extends limited internal visibility to full visibility across all users, locations, networks and devices and enables consistent security policies across constantly evolving infrastructure while eliminating blind spots and weak links in the potential attack surface.

Visibility of What’s on the Network

Educational organizations can use Pulse Profiler to automatically detect and continuously profile managed and agentless devices on various networks and resources. With a single view of all devices connecting to all environments, the security administrator can monitor devices for profile changes, track device inventory for asset management and gather connectivity information for troubleshooting. Pulse Profiler provided visibility, with threat reduction by Pulse Policy Secure, ensures that companies are fully protected from malware attacks and detected threats are rapidly isolated and mitigated.

Granular Security Policies for any Use Case

Educational organizations can implement a policy-driven “comply-to-connect” strategy that controls access to resources and services, based on device type and health, domain, locations, resources, users and groups. Pulse Policy Secure NAC strengthens network security posture with capabilities that include endpoint vulnerability assessments, device posture checks and alert integration with next generation firewalls for speedy mitigation.

Secure Access Regardless of Location, Device or User

Employees and students can use the Pulse Client to securely access necessary resources remotely via the Pulse Connect Secure VPN, or locally via the school’s WiFi network. Pulse Policy Secure authenticates employees and students locally based on their role and desired resource, automatically provisioning firewalls without manual intervention to provide remote access and immediately access proper resources.

Pulse Essentials Plus Suite

Essentials Plus provides secure, seamless hybrid IT access for desktops, laptops, mobile, and IoT devices to data center and cloud infrastructure. And, it includes centralized, cloud-based management of Secure Access infrastructure with extensive interoperability.

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Pulse Advanced Plus Suite

Advanced Plus adds on-premise role-based and device access enforcement and Optimal Gateway Selection that connects users to nearest available application gateway for best response, and User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA).

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Pulse Enterprise Plus Suite

Enterprise Plus adds robust disaster recovery capabilities across regions, data centers, and cloud along with flexible load balancing for applications and gateways for optimized traffic flow and user experience.

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Benefits Delivered

Focus on the real life benefits the user gains by applying our solutions to solve these industry-specific issues.

Secure Access for teachers, administrators and students
One security framework that protects all the networks of an educational organization, cloud resources, all devices from all locations and all users—extends limited internal visibility to full visibility across all users, locations, networks and devices
Enables adoption of digital learning initiatives, including personalized learning, learning management systems, virtual classrooms, mobile learning, augmented/virtual reality while maintaining consistent security
Provides instant scalability to handle peak and drastic changes in demand as well as new traffic due to academic deadlines or new apps or services that have just been rolled out
Eases burden on security team through automated and self-service onboarding of devices
Prevents access from unauthorized users

Prevents use of non-secure or non-compliant devices and network connections

Recognition

“When the world transitioned to remote work, we already had Pulse Secure in place and had been using it for years. We knew Pulse would scale up to easily meet the demand of moving the majority of our workers to remote employees.”

– Gary Marston, IT Manager, St. Paul's School

"We wanted to be able to customize and be creative with our academic offerings. They’re getting the real experiences, using real tools like Pulse Secure’s tools.”

– Chair of Computer Science and Engineering, Fairfield University School of Engineering

Read the full article here

American University

"What I've been most impressed with is that it was able to scale up sixfold and still maintain a usable user experience and throughput. Man, I'm impressed!"

- Eric Weakland, Director of Information Security, American University

Read the case study here

Indiana University

"When Indiana University moved to online learning this spring due to COVID, use of our Pulse Secure VPN skyrocketed overnight. The Pulse Secure support team was quick to assist us to ensure the reliability and scalability of our VPN environment for the immediate situation as well as help us plan for the long-term remote access needs for our faculty, staff and students."

- Mark Spencer, Manager, Campus Network Engineering, Indiana University

ARTICLE

See how Pitt University uses Pulse Secure

ANALYST REPORT

Read the EMA Research Top 3 Report and Decision Guide

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WHITE PAPER

Read the Secure Access Checklist

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