Stroud College Chooses ForeScout CounterACT NAC to Protect Campus Network

Stroud College offers a wide choice of educational courses for students of all ages. Its full and part-time courses attract around 4,700 students each year.

The college's IT team started looking at Network Access Control (NAC) solutions in spring 2009. It evaluated several different vendors' NAC products plus an open-source NAC solution.

Tim Hanks, IT Services Manager at Stroud College, said: “We were looking for a network access control product that had three qualities:

• It needed to work easily with our existing networks - both our new wireless network and our existing hard-wired network. Flexible deployment options were very important for us.
• It needed to work with every endpoint on our networks - all computers, no matter who owns them.
• It needed to have a lot of functionality to justify the purchase price. Stroud College is not rolling in money, and frankly, we were not sure that any NAC product would justify itself.”

Tim Hanks continued: “When we put ForeScout CounterACT on our network to evaluate it, we said 'Wow!' It actually delivers a lot more functionality than their marketing literature says it does. And it is very easy to use.”

Today, ForeScout CounterACT gives Stroud College strong network security. It prevents the spread of viruses on the network, and it allows the IT team to see and control everything on the network. ForeScout CounterACT detects rogue network devices which, by definition, present a security problem.

Hanks commented: “Having deployed ForeScout CounterACT, the risk that viruses could spread within our network has been reduced to about zero. So our initial goal has been met. An unexpected benefit is the fact that we are saving time - we can identify and respond to security problems with a simple right mouse-click.”

John Hagerty, EMEA Sales Director for ForeScout, commented: “In the UK and abroad, customers are looking for network security solutions that work with their existing heterogeneous IT infrastructure. This is where ForeScout appliances really excel. In just a few hours, we were able to prove to Stroud College that we could satisfy their requirements.”

Evaluation and deployment of the ForeScout appliance for Stroud College was carried out by systems integrator Axial Systems. Peter Thompson, account manager at Axial, said: “Stroud College is testament to CounterACT's ease of use - this customer has achieved within weeks what other colleges have required months to achieve when using a different NAC solution.”