A dialog with Shawnee Heights Faculty District
You’ve possible heard us speaking extra about safety resilience in latest weeks. Resilience has at all times been a key a part of cybersecurity, however the previous few years have actually highlighted its significance.
At Cisco, we outline safety resilience as: The flexibility to guard the integrity of each facet of your small business to face up to unpredictable threats or adjustments, after which emerge stronger. Relying on the enterprise, it will look a bit totally different for each group.
For the Shawnee Heights Faculty District in Kansas, it means empowering roughly 3,700 Ok-12 college students with fashionable schooling expertise together with laptops and iPads, whereas nonetheless sustaining the safety and integrity of the district’s information and infrastructure. Shawnee Heights has about 5,500 units on its community daily, three-quarters of which go house with employees and college students every evening.
We just lately spoke with Shawnee Heights IT Director and Cisco Gateway Cybersecurity Ambassador, Blair Anderson, to listen to about how the district retains these instructional units safe as they journey forwards and backwards to unprotected networks.
Q: How can you let so many units depart your community every day and nonetheless really feel secure?
Blair: With Cisco, we’ve the safety in place to maintain our units secured regardless of the place they go. I do know that after they depart, we nonetheless have visibility into what’s occurring and the threats they may very well be bringing into our district. We will remediate the threats earlier than they even hit our community the following day.
Q: How have latest adjustments in expertise impacted your safety?
Blair: Digitalization has had a huge effect on Shawnee Heights. We’ve moved away from textbooks and deployed units to all our college students. That’s an enormous change. We’ve additionally seen a considerable enhance within the quantity of paperwork and information going up into the cloud. That creates a necessity for us to verify all this data is safe, and that our customers don’t get compromised.
Q: What precisely had been you in search of in a safety answer?
Blair: A number of years in the past, we didn’t have the safety in place to maintain these units protected. They had been coming again into the district with every kind of threats, and we needed to continuously reimage them. Once we began a safety structure, we wished one thing that was within the cloud and that would hold our employees and college students secure 24/7, twelve months a 12 months.
We additionally wished one thing that might run within the background. We didn’t need safety pop-ups and alerts impacting our customers and their day-to-day routine. On the identical time, it was essential for our IT employees to have in-depth visibility into what was occurring on every machine to simply detect, observe, and mitigate assaults.
Q: How does Cisco enable you to safeguard the transition to digital studying?
Blair: By means of a mixture of applied sciences together with Cisco Safe Endpoint and Cisco Umbrella, we are able to see and block assaults from a number of vectors — together with the web and e mail — whether or not a tool is on or off the community. Most significantly, it’s all built-in by way of the Cisco SecureX platform, so we get a unified view into our techniques and potential dangers, and may also automate and speed up our response. Cisco Talos is the brains behind all of it. We be taught a lot from Cisco and the sources they make out there to us.
Q: How has Cisco helped you develop into extra cyber resilient?
Blair: Earlier than Cisco, we didn’t know whether or not malware was on our units till employees and college students introduced it to our consideration. We didn’t have the perception to be proactive and stop vital injury. Our employees and college students had been slowed down with continuous safety disruptions, and it was very annoying as a result of it took away from what they wanted to get performed within the classroom.
Now, we all know precisely when threats hit our district, and may hold our employees and college students secure earlier than they even discover one thing has occurred. Since integrating Cisco safety merchandise, we haven’t had any main threats have an effect on our employees and college students.
In safety, you at all times must be fascinated by what’s subsequent. Cisco frees up time for our IT employees to concentrate on higher-level initiatives that may transfer us ahead from a expertise standpoint.
Q: Along with deploying the suitable expertise, what else can organizations do to be extra safety resilient?
Blair: Everybody has a task to play in safety. My colleagues and I usually talk with employees and college students about what we’re seeing and the safety we’ve in place. It’s crucial that everybody is aware of what we’re doing and why, to allow them to work alongside us to guard themselves, one another, and the district from cyberattacks.
I’m at all times studying too. Being concerned within the Cisco Gateway group has allowed me to realize invaluable information to assist hold Shawnee Heights cyber resilient — whereas additionally sharing my expertise with others.
Watch the brand new video for extra safety insights from Shawnee Heights:
Go to our safety resilience web page to find the right way to defend your small business in opposition to present and future disruptions.
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