Marlborough Boys College is considered to be one of New Zealand's leading secondary schools. The college is located in Blenheim, the principal town of the Marlborough province. To provide protection and to ensure control of its IT security, Marlborough Boys' College has deployed Sopho's integrated endpoint and email security solutions across every server, desktop and email gateway. Additionally, every computer is automatically updated and centrally managed using Sophos's Central Management Console.
The college's investment in technology is a key contributor to student, teaching and administrative success and supporting this investment is a commitment to providing a safe and secure online environment for all computer users.
Realising that the repercussions of a virus or spyware outbreak reaching students and staff could spread far beyond its gates, the college selected Sophos as its IT security partner in late 2005. Sophos specialises in IT security for the K-12 education sector and currently protects more than six million teachers, students and administrators around the world.
According to Peter Olliver, Marlborough Boys College information manager, "Schools are unique organisations in that the systems are often targeted by hackers, spammers and virus writers thinking that our defences are weak. The paradox, of course, is that we have a significant duty of care to our staff and especially our students, and therefore must have quite strong defences in place."
The college has deployed Sophos' integrated antivirus, anti-spam, anti-spyware and email policy solutions across every server, desktop and email gateway at the college. Every computer is automatically updated and centrally managed using Sophos' central management console.
The network features five IBM Blade servers and a Windows 2003 Exchange Server. The college also provides more than 300 desktop computers for student use as well as computers for each of the teaching and administrative staff.
"Sophos is a great solution for the college because we have been able to effectively set and forget the system", Olliver says. "Sophos updates automatically in the background, without requiring any administration, and if we do have to make any changes, it is easily done through Sophos' central management console."
The college also permits every student and staff member to remotely access its network and applications via their laptops and home PCs through a Citrix Access Gateway.
"Sophos constantly protects our students and staff from viruses and spyware when they connect to the school network through Citrix. At any point in time we can have hundreds of people logging on and off our network remotely, so it is vital that we can support their needs with high-speed access. The use of Sophos does not impact on our network performance," Olliver said.
"Since taking on Sophos we have never had a major computer virus outbreak across our network. Furthermore, with Sophos we feel our network is future-proofed against new threats that may arise as we ramp up our internet infrastructure through participation in the Marlborough region's Loop Project which will provide us with very high-speed internet access, in excess of 200 mb/s."
"The Sophos software was a very welcome change from our previous antivirus solution which required our IT administration staff to be very hands-on with its day-to-day management, and it had a degrading impact on our network performance," Olliver concluded.
