City of Wolverhampton College has deployed Check Point’s Next Generation Threat Prevention to secure and manage its network. The solution includes firewalling, anti-virus, anti-bot, IPS and application control to defend against both known and unknown threats.
“The Check Point solution gives us confidence that our network is fully protected, and that the security rules and policies we have set are working effectively. The interface is simple and user-friendly, and it’s easy for us to make changes to rules, which was a key requirement. All in all, it has made our network more secure and reduced the demand on the College’s IT team,” said Darren Webley, IT Manager at City of Wolverhampton College.
With over 3,000 students and around 500 staff using the college’s network, as well as graduates that still have access to online resources, the college needed a security solution with advanced threat prevention features, and easy management to protect its network and data from both internal and external attacks. One of the College’s main security challenges is controlling peer-to-peer file sharing via BitTorrent, due to the high bandwidth usage and exposure to malicious content: as such, it required a solution capable of identifying and managing the use of file sharing services.
The deployment of the Check Point solution was managed by Check Point partner Atomos Networks, replacing a security appliance from Cyberoam. The new solution has improved and simplified City of Wolverhampton College’s network security management, making the organisation less reliant on third-party support.
Atomos also conducted a free security discovery process called from Check Point called Security CheckUp, providing a detailed report on the security status of the College’s network ahead of the deployment, giving it a better understanding of potential vulnerabilities and issues in its network infrastructure.
“It’s now much easier for us to identify and prevent the use of peer-to-peer applications, and we are now much less reliant on third-party support. As we expand our BYOD provision for students and provide more online services, the Check Point solution enables us to manage it efficiently and securely in-house. We were not able to do this with our previous security gateway: its management interface was not intuitive, and rules often did not work as expected so we often needed external help. This caused delays in launching new services, and gave us less visibility over what was going on across our network,” said Webley.
