Industry Solutions: For Educational Institutions



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


Open network accessibility, the comings and goings of countless students and faculty every year, high-bandwidth Internet connections, thousands of uncontrolled hosts, poor security mechanisms, and student privacy concerns all combine to make campus networks inherently difficult to secure and control and perfect targets for malicious behavior and threats.

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. Additionally, campus 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 include:

  • Limited control over the integrity and security of student PCs and other network-enabled devices
  • Protecting valuable 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 and compliance requirements, including PCI and HIPAA


QRadar for Educational Institutions

QRadar lets educational institutions implement a comprehensive security surveillance strategy that will significantly improve their ability to effectively manage the many daily IT security challenges they face.

By using QRadar, educational institutions can:

  • Monitor the network for evolving threats on student PCs and quickly remediate security incidents that are due to unsecure systems – without the need to install desktop agents
  • Develop and enforce security policies on university-owned IT assets that maintain confidential or sensitive information; deliver comprehensive auditing of access to these systems
  • Improve application monitoring and behavioral analysis to detect rogue or inappropriate applications according to defined policies
  • Implement a campus-wide security program that is network-, security-, application-, and identity-aware
  • Incorporate specific compliance features, including log management, network and security policy monitoring and enforcement, and compliance reporting


QRadar in Action: Real World Deployments

  • QRadar is used by many institutions of higher learning to monitor and enforce campus-wide policies of acceptable Internet use, including file sharing, gaming, and peer-to-peer applications
  • QRadar is used by numerous 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 various colleges and universities for improved surveillance of nefarious user activity in a multi-vendor network environment


Related link:

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