Customer Success Stories
“With CounterACT, we no longer run the risk of our students flooding the network with viruses. It continuously scans each laptop to ensure that anti-virus is up-to-date and alerts students, when necessary, to update their anti-virus.”
Sutton Valence Protects School Network with ForeScout CounterACT
Challenge:
- Established in 1576 and set in the beautiful surroundings of the Kent countryside, Sutton Valence School (SVS) is a co-educational independent day and boarding school for ages 3 to 18. It is one of the oldest public schools in the UK. The network connects staff, pupils and guests within 15 buildings and one branch location.
- In 2007, SVS began looking for a network access control solution to prevent risky laptops from infecting the school’s network, and to protect against self-propagating threats.
Solution:
- SVS’s Network Manager Mark Gosden was looking for a cost-effective NAC solution that demonstrated the ability to monitor network traffic and block rogue workstations from accessing the network. Good vendor support was also required.. After evaluating a number of NAC solutions, SVS chose ForeScout CounterACT. A single CounterACT appliance was installed by SVS in 2008 to protect 1,000 on-campus endpoint devices.
- Gosden explains:
“We chose CounterACT because it enables us to protect our network from potentially damaging machines brought onsite by boarding school students. CounterACT performed exactly as we wanted, at a lower cost compared to the competition. CounterACT checks any new device that connects to our network to make sure it has AV and that it is up to date.”
Results:
- Threat Prevention.
“CounterACT analyzes network traffic for threats. If it sees traffic from one device flooding one of our servers, it will block the traffic and the user will lose his or her connection.”
- Simplified compliance and reporting.
“CounterACT is definitely helping Sutton Valence achieve compliance, in terms of our information security policy, and has a strong, flexible reporting capability. I have created a couple of report templates of my own – the process is easy and accurate.”
- Complete network visibility.
“Sutton Valence has recently opened a new presentation theatre on campus. Though the theatre is a wonderful asset for the school, it brings additional security risks when guest speakers plug-in their laptops and require network access. ForeScout CounterACT protects against these types of threats, helping to optimize the uptime and availability of our network.”