News
ForeScout CounterACT Helps Rollins College Improve Network Visibility, Security and End User Experience
January 2014 by Marc Jacob
ForeScout Technologies, Inc., a provider of pervasive network security solutions for Global 2000 enterprises and government organisations, today announced that Rollins College, a leading liberal arts school, chose ForeScout CounterACT™ to help manage the growing number of personally-owned devices on its wired and wireless networks as well as to assess and prevent devices that do not adhere to the college’s security policy from connecting – all while maintaining ease of use for the end user.
Rollins College, located in Winter Park, Florida, has approximately 4,000 users, including faculty, staff, students and guests, using devices ranging from traditional laptops and desktops to smartphones, gaming devices, tablets and set top boxes. The staff has the option of using a college-owned computer or bringing in their own device (BYOD). This BYOD policy combined with the transient nature of the student population required a comprehensive, efficient and flexible way to manage devices connecting to the network.
Rollins initially deployed a competitor’s network access control (NAC) solution in hope of minimising the number of unsecured and unauthorised devices. Unfortunately, the solution did not sufficiently meet the growing college’s needs as it required dedicated IT staff to manage and was disruptive to the end user.
After the negative experience with the previous implementation, the school desired an agentless product capable of verifying who is connecting to the network and determining what kind of access they need in order to improve network security and minimise user impact.
“We chose CounterACT because it was the only solution that met all of our criteria,” said Troy Thomason, manager, networks and communications, department of IT at Rollins College. “It is low impact for our end users and very simple to setup. In fact, we started seeing results on the first day. Plus, the interface is easy to navigate, and the solution requires very little maintenance after the initial deployment.”
The easy-to-manage NAC solution gives Rollins College’s IT team real-time visibility and control across all devices on the network, including details such as users, switch ports, active processes and applications – all while being unobtrusive to the user.
Rollins College has 10 CounterACT appliances monitoring and protecting approximately 6,000 endpoints across the campus’s 75 connected buildings. The CounterACT dashboard makes it easy for the Rollins IT team to monitor the entire network from one screen and see all activity. Additionally, the system allows IT to drill down into a particular user’s system if it is acting peculiarly.
“We recently had a spear phishing attack. We used CounterACT to create a virtual firewall that allowed us to automatically notify users that their machine was compromised and to request they bring it to the help desk for remediation,” said Rollins College CIO Pat Schoknecht. “This incident really opened my eyes to the power of CounterACT and its ability to enhance our security posture.”
Rollins College has also capitalised on CounterACT’s time-saving guest networking capabilities. Previously, the IT team registered guests manually, but with ForeScout, they now allow anybody with a Rollins College email address to sponsor a guest. The visitor receives the necessary information from the network portal, allowing them to connect to the guest SSID. Their sponsor can then easily approve the guest’s connection. The approach is very hands off for the Rollins College IT and help desk teams, which ultimately saves both time and money.
After implementing CounterACT, Rollins College was able to free up more than 100 man-hours of IT time per month based on the product’s ease of use and its automated approach, which helped minimise manual network monitoring and policy enforcement.
“I have been able to take a very qualified person who was realistically spending 75 percent of his time supporting our previous NAC and reassign them to more strategic IT projects,” said Thomason.
