News
Norwich School Increases Secure Posture through Enhanced Visibility Provided by CounterACT
April 2015 by Marc Jacob
ForeScout Technologies, Inc., a provider of continuous monitoring and mitigation solutions for Global 2000 enterprises and government organisations, today announced that Norwich School has deployed ForeScout CounterACT™ to provide enhanced visibility for devices accessing its network, while ensuring compliance with industry regulations, and helping to mitigate potential breaches before they become problematic.
Based in the Cathedral Close, Norwich, UK, Norwich School is a co-educational, independent day school for pupils aged seven to 18. Norwich School required a network access control (NAC) solution to increase the visibility and security compliance of devices being used by its 1050 students and approximately 250 staff, in one location across multiple buildings.
“CounterACT, in our opinion, had an easier to use interface which makes setting up, managing and viewing potential threats a far easier task. With a small team it was critical that NAC wouldn’t take up too much of our time, both in the set up phase and beyond,” said Steve Banyard, network manager at Norwich School. “Another major appeal was that we wouldn’t have to modify our network to integrate the product. Also, there are multiple ways to enforce security policies depending on your environment and the client agent is optional.”
How ForeScout helped:
Time and cost savings – “CounterACT has already saved us time, which equates to money, by allowing us to easily track down which devices are plugged in to what switch port, which really helps us when troubleshooting network-related issues,” said Steve Banyard, network manager at Norwich School. “The visibility provided by the solution maximises our network security, and helps us mitigate potential security breaches.”
Real-time visibility, NAC and threat prevention – CounterACT was initially used for visibility purposes only – to correctly classify devices and users. Since the initial deployment, Norwich School has extended its use of the solution to network access control, disallowing non-corporate devices from accessing network resources, and threat prevention.
Policy creation and enforcement – Norwich School has created customised security policies via CounterACT.
Blocking P2P applications – CounterACT looks for multiple P2P applications including BitTorrent, uTorrent and FrostWire, among many others running on network endpoints, and is capable of killing the processes and/or notifying the administrators.
Security product integration – leveraging ForeScout’s ControlFabric architecture, Norwich School is able to integrate CounterACT with other existing security applications, allowing them to obtain actionable intelligence that CounterACT can mitigate against.
