SecureWare delivers endpoint security to Catholic Education South Australia with McAfee

After noticing changes in the way security endpoints were managed in its schools, Catholic Education South Australia (CESA) sought a new anti-virus solution that emphasised strong multi-tenancy management and sophisticated malware detection.

CESA, a non-profit body that directs policy for 103 catholic schools across South Australia, noticed an increase in BYOD across its schools, which raised concerns about how students could securely use their devices in harmony with the school's IT infrastructure.

The organisation was also conscious that certain schools, undergoing migrations of local services into cloud applications like Microsoft Office 365, had additional endpoint security concerns, where students might be accessing school information from multiple devices both at home and on campus.

CESA approached SecureWare, who coordinated an RFP process with four anti-virus vendors. McAfee's endpoint protection suite was selected to consolidate more than 100 disparate endpoint security management systems.

SecureWare worked with McAfee to develop a flexible licensing model specifically for CESA, allowing schools to consume the right mix of technology without any multi-year lock-in contracts.

Simon Sigré, senior networks engineer and technical lead at CESA said: "Without SecureWare facilitating the interaction with the vendor and removing the stress of lock-in contracts, we would never have been able to get to this point.

"When it comes to endpoint coverage and protection, we are on the front foot and in a position whereby our users feel assured and confident with their security posture."

CESA now has more than 20,000 protected endpoints, which grew organically in the eight months following the initial migration.

SecureWare tailored a solution to CESA which delivered endpoint protection-as-a-service (EPaaS), providing anytime access to a centralised management console, management of clients from any location, cloud updates, usage metrics, threat identification and false positive avoidance, dynamic protection for emerging threats, behaviour-based ransomware protection and hostile process elimination.

CESA now has a central multi-tenanted hosted service capable of sharing threat intelligence between tenants, protecting against targeted attacks.

Following the deployment, CESA has experienced a reduction in downtime from security incidents, freeing up relevant staff to engage in proactive projects as opposed to remediation efforts. There has also been an increase in the uptake and coverage of devices.

SecureWare is a finalist in the Trusted Systems category at the 2017 CRN Impact Awards. The full list of finalists will be announced at our CRN Pipeline conference in Melbourne on 22-23 March. The winners will be announced at the Impact Awards dinner during the CRN Pipeline conference in Sydney on 6-7 April.

Doing any cool projects this year? Fill out an online expression of interest and we will inform you when we open entries for the 2018 CRN Impact Awards. The form is quick and easy.