How A Utah School District With One IT Professional Gained A Better Understanding Of Their Security Posture and Saw Threats They Were Missing.
Background
For the security of the school and this use case, the name will be known as Southern Utah County School District. This school district comprises four schools and a centralized district building composed of administrative staff, serving five communities. The entire county school district is serviced by just one IT professional to manage all the hardware, software, networking, and cybersecurity needs of the schools and staff.
The school district selected SecurityMetrics Pulse Services to manage their cybersecurity needs. SecurityMetrics Pulse Platform was chosen to give their IT Manager more time to focus on performing his main IT responsibilities without having to worry about their security operations.
Cybersecurity Challenges
- Help improve the security posture of a smaller district with limited resources and budget; with threat analyst expertise while not breaking the bank.
- Assist a resource-constrained IT manager in securing their flat, non-segmented network, despite limited security expertise.
- Provide security peace of mind regarding their digital assets, correct misconfigurations, and stop threats with “eyes on glass” professionals monitoring full time.
Resolving Challenges With SecurityMetrics Help
- Southern Utah School District has one firewall, which requires SecurityMetrics to provide expert firewall rule guidance, eliminate firewall misconfigurations, and minimize the impact of network scans coming from outside the network on their limited firewall resources.
- Pulse Services provided the IT Manager with the ability to scan assets with ease in a single-view tool that helped him gain a better picture of what assets are in the school district environment and which devices have vulnerabilities or misconfigurations.
- Provided the school district with a prioritized pathway to resolve and patch vulnerabilities using Pulse Services.
- The school district utilized SecurityMetrics expert threat analysts to provide real-time guidance and notifications on threats and vulnerabilities in their environment – all captured into a centralized threat repository.
- Within the first month of service, several threat vectors were identified, patched, reconfigured, or remediated – from their firewall to their bus scheduling software.
Goals Achieved Working With SecurityMetrics
- Found a long-term, low-cost cybersecurity partner to prevent threats, help secure vulnerabilities, and correct network-wide misconfigurations.
- Gained peace of mind about which threats or threat actors are trying to exploit the school environment.
- SecurityMetrics provides a resource-strapped school district with cybersecurity subject matter expertise, reliable support, and correct answers to all cybersecurity questions.
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