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Case Studies > Clay County Schools District teaches cyberthreats a lesson

Clay County Schools District teaches cyberthreats a lesson

Technology Category
  • Cybersecurity & Privacy - Endpoint Security
  • Cybersecurity & Privacy - Network Security
Applicable Industries
  • Education
Applicable Functions
  • Business Operation
  • Facility Management
Services
  • System Integration
  • Training
The Challenge
In today’s classroom, learning takes place online as much as it does with books. That means school systems must keep students and teachers safe online and comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). With thousands of user devices and a myriad of operating systems and browsers, the School District of Clay County knows this is no easy feat. The district tried the Kaspersky solution, but virus scans slowed device performance. As a result, the information services (IS) team turned off many of the solution’s security features, leaving endpoints vulnerable to cyber threats. IS tried Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection and had a similar problem. Then it deployed Avast, which crashed 90 percent of the computers.
About The Customer
The School District of Clay County serves approximately 38,500 students in grades K-12 in Northeast Florida. Its mission is to work collaboratively with parents, teachers and administrators to provide students a motivating, challenging and rewarding public education. The district encompasses 42 schools and employs around 4,900 staff members, including 48 IT staff. The district is committed to ensuring a safe and secure online learning environment for its students and staff, which is crucial in today's digital age where online learning is as prevalent as traditional classroom learning.
The Solution
To strengthen endpoint protection, the IS team evaluated various solutions. With its layered, next-generation security capabilities and streamlined manageability, Bitdefender proved the best choice. Clay County Schools deployed Bitdefender GravityZone Enterprise Security, including GravityZone Security for Endpoints and GravityZone Security for Virtualized Environments. Using Bitdefender GravityZone management console, IT is rolling out GravityZone to 11,000 endpoints across 42 school campuses. Endpoints include Microsoft Windows and Apple laptops, as well as 100 physical servers and a mix of 250 Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere virtual machines (VMs).
Operational Impact
  • Since adopting the GravityZone solution, Clay County Schools reports reliable, high-performance endpoint protection. For example, Bitdefender offloads resource-intensive security tasks to a security virtual appliance, which helps reduce impact on the VM’s performance, increase virtualization density, and improve application response times.
  • GravityZone’s machine-learning based engine proactively detects and prevents ransomware, which affected users in the past. In the case of WannaCry and Petya, Bitdefender provides automatic protection from zero day threats without requiring any updates. And it prevents viruses from infecting endpoints via external media such as USB drives, which also is a common problem.
  • In addition, more advanced features, such as GravityZone’s built-in environment-aware firewall, protect devices regardless of location. This allows IS to implement one policy when a device is on its secure internal network and another when the device travels outside of school.
Quantitative Benefit
  • Protected 11,000 endpoints across 42 school campuses.
  • Reduced security-related help desk calls dramatically.
  • Prevented a $10,000 incident caused by rogue applications.

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