The Plano Independent School District is located
approximately 20 miles north of downtown Dallas, Texas, encompassing 100
square miles in the southwest corner of Collin County. The district has 59
schools with approximately 50,000 students and 6,500 employees.
Previous
Security Solution Got Failing Grades
Anti-virus protection is critical to the Plano
Independent School District. With tens of thousands of students and
faculty users, the opportunities for security breaches are infinite. Users
bring in disks that contain viruses from home computers, and, from time to
time, experimental young minds attempt to crash the network. “A group of
students could continually scan our network drives in a concerted effort
with the client portion of the virus protection software we were using to
bring the network to a grinding halt,” said Ted Ziolkowski, one of the
school district’s desktop integration engineers. “We wanted to prevent
instances where students could attempt to shut down the network by
conducting a type of denial of service attack.”
With their previous software, users were required to
update pattern files manually. Obviously, that didn’t always happen, and
their IT staff would have to spend extra time distributing updates and
managing problems on each workstation manually. At any given moment, many
of the desktops were without the latest pattern files. When security
breaches occurred, the staff would then have to spend precious time and
resources on clean up and restoration.
Plano needed an Anti-virus solution that would move
the virus update responsibility away from individual workstations and into
a centrally managed, secure system. They identified ease of management,
flexible configurability, high performance and user transparency as their
main criteria for a successful solution. They also wanted the solution to
change their approach to security. In the past, they tended to be reactive
and stamp out fires as they flared up. A proactive approach would allow
them to eliminate the man-hours required to visit individual workstations
to resolve issues, clean infected desktops and rebuild workstations after
breaches.
Worry-Free
eTrust Secures the Network
Now that Plano has implemented eTrust
Anti-virus from Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA), they have an
automated and proactive solution. “It’s set up and we can basically forget
about it,” said David Vincent, another desktop integration engineer at the
district. “There’s really no more interaction.”
eTrust Anti-virus allows them to manage 23,000
workstations from a single point of management. All updates are pushed
from a centralized location to local servers and configured to work with
the desktop so that security is completely transparent to the end users.
“The beauty of this product is that each workstation is updated every time
a user logs in,” said Ziolkowski. “If there’s an update available, it
updates the pattern files at that time.” Vincent and Ziolkowski no longer
need to waste man-hours and resources on reactive update and recovery
exercises.
CA Stays
After School for Extra Credit
In order to prevent denial of service attacks, the Plano
District had very specific requirements for user access security.
Essentially, they needed eTrust Anti-virus to completely lock down
the desktop agents so that absolutely no users could access settings.
“That was very important to us, and CA went above and beyond the call of
duty to accommodate our wishes,” said Ziolkowski. “CA Services actually
wrote a custom application extension for us and helped configure the
product exactly the way we wanted it,” he continued. “They flew a team of
techs out from New York and moved very quickly to deliver a solution that
met our time table,” added Vincent.
“We’re really pleased with the level of commitment
demonstrated,” said Ziolkowski. “The team put the whole force of CA behind
the project; stepping up to the challenge and helping us figure out the
details.”
Time and
Resource Savings
“We’ve reduced the amount of management required to
police the network tremendously,” said Ziolkowski. “This pertains to every
aspect of our operation, from a desktop support level to the network
support level to the help desk support level.” “Everybody involved in
network support, including our boss, has much more peace of mind now,”
said Vincent.
CA Helps With
Windows 2000 Migration
Just after purchasing eTrust Anti-virus, the
district began the process of migrating from Windows 95 to Windows 2000.
CA Services also helped with the development of installation files for
distributing eTrust Anti-virus across the new Windows 2000
environment.
“Our situation was unique since we had this Windows
2000 migration planned,” said Ziolkowski. “Instead of doing a remote
install, we configured an installation file which allowed us to implement
a highly configured and identical version of the product through our
district load to each and every workstation. We worked with several CA
support techs to create the file, and that helped make the roll-out much
easier.”
“We give this product two thumbs up,” said
Ziolkowski. “It’s an excellent solution that’s highly configurable and
extremely easy to manage. Those two things combined make it a hands-down
winner.”
