Australian Defence Force Academy Selects PatchLink to Protect Student Learning Environment
The Australian Defence Force Academy, a unique institution which provides office cadets and midshipmen with military training and undergraduate education, has selected PatchLink’s industry leading solution, PatchLink Update, to secure its student learning environment.
Contracted by Defence to provide undergraduate education, the University of New South Wales' Canberra campus, UNSW@ADFA, provides academic resources and staff to support more than 1,200 students. UNSW@ADFA offers a variety of disciplines to its students from physics, geography, foreign languages and oceanography to mechanical and civil engineering, computer science and management.
In addition to each student having their own computer, UNSW@ADFA itself has a compliment of 2,500 PCs and 40 servers deployed with a mixture of Windows and UNIX operating systems software.
Up until recently, UNSW@ADFA's IT infrastructure has been manually patched via a manual download patch process which has proven to be both time consuming and involve a significant effort by the IT department in terms of staff hours required. This is compounded with the requirement to securely patch student computers increasing the total number of PCs on the network to around 3,700 nodes.
Each month, the organisation's IT operations department faced a slow patching process that often left workstations and the IT network vulnerable.
In addition, a team of up to four people were dedicated at certain times in the month to the manual patching process.
"Some servers would be taken down over the weekend rather than during the week and each server could take between one and two hours to patch.
Moreover, student computers were being compromised potentially placing document integrity at risk," said Nenad Stefanovic, Manager of ICT Services for UNSW@ADFA.
"With each student having their own personal computer and using a variety of software, we required a system whereby we could automatically place a patch update on our primary source of virus, the student machine accessing the network.
We wanted to deploy a security solution that could handle the throughput while delivering the highest levels of protection and supplementing our existing firewall and anti-spam infrastructure," said Stefanovic.
Following a review of solutions and in line with its strategy to provide a better quality of teaching and learning to students, UNSW@ADFA selected PatchLink Update as part of its proactive approach to security.
PatchLink can install the most up-to-date patches automatically irrespective of operating software and provide a centralised, automated patch management system for the Academy's student infrastructure. PatchLink Update also enables organisations to handle mass security updates as well as install new software and patches, and remove decommissioned software, with minimal interruption for each user.
"Once we saw what PatchLink could do we were impressed by its flexibility and its ability to remotely provide subcategories for different systems," said Stefanovic. "For example, our Laboratory and academic staff PCs have separate needs to students in that they may have a requirement to farm out permission for administrative staff to access IT systems in the different schools.
PatchLink was the only vendor that could do this effectively providing us with the visibility and added security protection we needed.
In addition, we found with PatchLink that we could actually patch a variety of business applications as well as the operating software itself."
With PatchLink Update agents deployed on computers, the UNSW@ADFA team can efficiently and effectively determine if machines are patched and compliant as soon as they log onto the network. The automated process also allows the IT team to push out the latest patches remotely from any location. Stefanovic stated: "The cost of the product is small compared to the cost in man time savings.
We'll now be able to dedicate more of the IT department's resources to high-end system infrastructure improvements, including the roll out of an online learning management system and a brand new blade storage area networking server infrastructure rather than worrying about what software people have."
Once implemented, PatchLink will provide a three dimensional protection from undesired access, malicious content and rate-based attacks that the Academy needs to ensure its students, faculty and staff, and systems are adequately protected from.
Reproduced from an article published by IT Wire
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http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/6933/545/
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