SUNY Plattsburgh Relies on Forcepoint as a First Line of Defense
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.