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SUNY Plattsburgh Relies on Forcepoint as a First Line of Defense

Group of students walking

Industry

Education

Headquarters

United States

SUNY Plattsburgh needed to safeguard its network from outside threats, while allowing the free sharing of information and content critical to a university environment. The school utilizes Forcepoint Next Generation Firewalls (NGFW) to secure the network and provide visibility to help the IT team keep it running smoothly.

Challenges

  • Maintain openness that allows students, faculty and staff to share the content they need, while protecting the network from threats and blocking vulnerabilities.
  • Deliver visibility into network traffic to enable optimization and troubleshooting.

Approach

  • Implement Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall appliances and virtual appliances in two clusters to protect internet traffic as well as serve as an active backup in case of an outage.

Results

  • Forcepoint NGFW firewalls now act as a “first line of defense,” according to IT Manager, Jim Lucas. “We use it to protect our students, our faculty, our employees. But we also use it to protect our assets.”
  • The # of incidents blocked by the firewalls is “too many to count – it’s happening every second,” explained Lucas.
  • The Security Management Center provides the power and flexibility to manage the firewalls centrally and efficiently.
  • The team is able to leverage NGFW to troubleshoot application-level problems, such as desktop scanning/printer issues for example, by examining network traffic
  • By leveraging NGFW’s redundancy features uptime is over 99.999%.

“Academic freedom is really our mantra so people should be able to do anything they need to do here.”

Jim Lucas
,
IT Manager
Customer Profile

The State University of New York College at Plattsburgh is a public liberal arts college in Plattsburgh, New York founded in 1889.