Published on 27-Sep-2011
Customer:
Melbourne IT
Industry:
Telecommunications
Deployment country:
Australia
Solution:
Managing Risk, Security: Governance, Risk and Compliance, Systems & Network Management, Website Security & Compliance
Overview
Chris Polkinghorne of Melbourne IT discusses the challenges of managing security at a school system in Australia.
Business need:
Melbourne IT face the challenges of managing security at a school system in Australia.
Solution:
We're using IBM network IPSs at our borders of the hosting platform. We're using the host IPS agents on like high risk servers, and all that feeds back to a central site protector system, which is collecting all the information, and doing reporting, and log correlation.
Benefits:
The network IPS has given us a great level of visibility with sitting on our borders, and so it sees an immense amount of traffic.
Video
Chris Polkinghorne of Melbourne IT discusses the challenges of managing security at a school system in Australia.
Video Transcript
Chris Polkinghorne of Melbourne IT discusses the challenges of managing security at a school system in Australia.
My name's Chris Polkinghorne. I work for Melbourne IT, and I'm the security technical lead.
Our position is that we do manage IT services for every single school in our state, Queensland. So that gives us a massive range of challenges. The biggest and most interesting one is probably the fact that we're working in this environment where we essentially have two networks that we need to work with. One is the Internet and one is the school system. So we have to use our security solutions to sort of border off these zones and keep those two forces away from each other as best we can.
We're supporting approximately 480,000 students, about 1,300 schools.
Just web traffic alone, we're doing about 20 terabytes a month. And then the network traffic would be enormous.
The students, they're inquisitive by nature, and you don't want to discourage that. Unfortunately, sometimes that learning takes them to places which are not the best for them to go to.
We're using IBM network IPSs at our borders of the hosting platform. We're using the host IPS agents on like high risk servers, and all that feeds back to a central site protector system, which is collecting all the information, and doing reporting, and log correlation.
It's all automatic. When it picks something up, it'll sort of look and check your rule system. And if we've defined it as block this then it'll go and block it. So when we see these attacks coming in, it'll shut them down automatically.
The network IPS has given us a great level of visibility with sitting on our borders, and so it sees an immense amount of traffic.
It's been great for like sites that are actually hosting like web servers, or hosting websites. It's been great for that because it gets the view, like when the SSL traffic's decrypted that a network IPS doesn't get. So it's been fantastic for that.
Yeah, I mean, the security products from IBM, they've given us, they really do give you a good return on your money. From my perspective, it saves me a lot of time, and it saves my team a lot of time, which I can say it's very well worth it.
Smart means doing the best with the resources you've got.
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.