News
ForeScout CounterACT Secures BYOD Program for Long Road Sixth Form College
June 2014 by Marc Jacob
ForeScout Technologies, Inc. announced that Long Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge has selected ForeScout CounterACT to ease the roll-out of its bring your own device (BYOD) program by providing real-time visibility of what is connected to the network: devices - personal and mobile, applications and users. These factors, combined with broad infrastructure interoperability, have helped to increase the security of Long Road’s network, as well as the productivity of the students.
One of the largest colleges in East Anglia, Long Road Sixth Form College prides itself on high levels of examination success and making learning as easy and effective as possible for its 2,200 students. With the proliferation of laptops, tablets and mobile devices now being used in education, the senior management team at Long Road decided a BYOD policy would make the college more attractive to prospective students and ultimately save money in the long-term.
Jason Dear, IT services manager of Long Road Sixth Form College, explained, “We discussed purchasing tablets for student use, but the cost, inconvenience and management overhead was prohibitive. In order to roll out this BYOD project successfully, we needed a new Wi-Fi system that had single SSID coverage in every classroom and common room on the campus, but critically, we needed visibility and control over the connected devices.”
Long Road relayed this visibility and control requirement to its trusted IT security provider, Foursys, which immediately recommended ForeScout’s CounterACT platform. Foursys arranged a Proof of Concept (PoC) with the college to examine next-generation network access control (NAC) capabilities and more. The IT team was amazed by the results, particularly when compared to Bradford Networks’ agent-based approach.
“When comparing functionality, the differential was obvious. We asked if the Bradford Networks solution could do several crucial items required for our BYOD roll out, such as remediation and application control, but it couldn’t be done without installing agents. ForeScout was by far the better solution – and I can’t recommend it highly enough for BYOD deployments,” Dear stated.
After PoC approval, Foursys was able to readily deploy CounterACT at Long Road Sixth Form College, which seamlessly integrated with the college’s existing network infrastructure – comprised of 50 servers, half virtual and half physical; 1,200 PCs; 300 laptops and 150 Macs - as well as the new campus-wide Wi-Fi network. Ease of use and low overhead on IT support time are two additional benefits of using next-gen NAC for Long Road’s IT team.
“At Long Road Sixth Form College, Foursys immediately recognised CounterACT as a perfect match for the college’s requirements, helping to deliver a secure BYOD environment as students bring ever more devices onto the campus network,” said Louise Bulman, vice president of EMEA at ForeScout. “When it comes to comparing ForeScout CounterACT’s visibility, interoperability and control capabilities to others, the proof is in the pudding. We welcome other institutions to take us for a test drive and see the broad application and value that our solution brings to bear in network security, BYOD and endpoint compliance.”
