Industry Solutions: For Education

Challenge: Securing "open" campus networks in a world of threats

Campus networks are difficult to secure and control. From “open” network accessibility to the comings and goings of students each year, colleges and universities offer prime
opportunities for hackers,
vulnerabilities and threats.

High-bandwidth Internet connections, thousands of uncontrolled hosts, poor security mechanisms and student privacy concerns make campus networks perfect targets for malicious behavior.

Colleges and universities also face added internal misuse by technology-savvy students who create rogue servers, waste bandwidth, run inappropriate applications and tamper with network resources. University networks typically lack a defined perimeter to defend. Instead they maintain open, disparate networks that are difficult to secure.

Specific challenges faced by educational institutions organizations include:


  • Limited control over the integrity and security of student PCs and other network enabled devices
  • Protecting high value and proprietary research and sensitive information on faculty and administrative systems
  • Susceptible to use of high-bandwidth applications and running of rogue and illegal file sharing applications
  • Legal requirements to protect confidential student records
  • Requirements to meet specific regulatory requirements including PCI and HIPAA


QRadar solution for educational institutions

QRadar delivers, to educational institutions an ability to implement a comprehensive security surveillance strategy that will significantly improve an educational institutions ability to get a handle around many of the IT security challenges they face. Key benefits of QRadar for use by educational institutions include:


  • Ability to better monitor the network for evolving threats on student PCs and quickly remediate security incidents that are due to un-secure systems without installing desktop agents
  • Develop and enforce security policies on university owned IT assets that maintain confidential or sensitive information; Delivers comprehensive auditing of access to these systems
  • Improved ability through application monitoring and behavioral analysis to detect rogue or inappropriate applications according to defined policy
  • A solution that enables a campus-wide security program that is network, security, application and identity aware
  • Focused compliance features including log management, network and security policy monitoring and enforcement, and compliance reporting


Real world success stories include:


  • QRadar is used by many institutions of higher education to monitor and enforce campus-wide policies of acceptable internet use including file sharing, gaming, and peer-to-peer applications
  • QRadar is used by many educational institutions to support a broad spectrum of compliance requirements including the Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act (FERPA), PCI and HIPAA
  • QRadar is used by many educational institutions that wanted improved surveillance of user activity multi-vendor network environment


Useful links...

White Paper: Lessons in Threat Management - Lowering Security Risks in Campus Networks