Features

Prior to deploying intrusion-prevention firewalls, the Nederland Independent School District (ISD), located south of Beaumont, Texas, was faced with a myriad of unauthorized access and major hacking attempts by students, and constant external threats from the Internet. Since being installed, the firewalls have blocked thousands of worms and threats, with no hacking incidents since their deployment.

Fortunately, the school district is large enough to have a fairly sophisticated IT department that is able to spend time and resources evaluating, installing and maintaining such security solutions. Not all organizations, however, are so lucky.

Organizations with limited or no IT departments are experiencing growing encounters with security threats–from spam to spyware to phishing–according to a recent study conducted by security vendor Trend Micro. End-users are encountering malware more often, particularly in smaller companies, according to the findings, especially disquieting for resource-strapped organizations with little or no IT support.

The findings spotlight the challenge smaller organizations face in scaling IT resources to provide technical advice, conduct system scans, clean machines manually, deploy patches and security policies, and educate staff in order to enable a secure working environment.

“Smaller businesses face a dilemma,” says Steve Quane, general manager of Trend Micro’s small and medium business operations. “Encounters with security threats are rising faster in smaller organizations, but these same organizations are restricted by time, cost and available resources. Whether they have an IT organization or not, these businesses need solutions that make their lives easier, where security protection and threat prevention can be automated. Assessing the efficiency and cost of ownership of current security measures–measures that should protect all layers of a network against unpredictable threats–will help businesses to stay a step ahead of malicious attacks.”

The Trend Micro survey of 1,200 companies in the United States, Germany and Japan found that only about 54% of small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S. have an IT department. Yet, phishing encounters have increased in the past three months for about 40% of United States-based workers in small and midsize businesses, and spyware is becoming an increasing threat.

Given the growing complexity of corporate security needs and the evolving security landscape, companies need multilayered security strategies. Smaller organizations, however, often do not have the resources or staff for such multilayered approaches, leaving their networks more vulnerable to security threats.

At the Nederland ISD, eight iPolicy Networks IPF-3300 firewall systems have been deployed, one in each of the schools and one in the district administration office. All eight firewalls are centrally managed by a single management system, the iPolicy ISM-Express. The ISM central management console provides one-point configuration, monitoring and reporting control across the entire school district network spread over a three-mile radius campus.

“The firewalls have helped us stop more than 20,000 internal and external worms, viruses and attacks,” says Cindy Laird, director of instructional technology. “The best part was that we did not have to change our existing network and the firewalls were quick and easy to deploy.”

“Providing secure, legitimate network access to our students and faculty without compromising network security is a vital part of our mission,” explains Andre Rosales, Nederland ISD’s network administrator. “We needed a security product that would protect us now and in the future.”

when faculty, staff and students arrived at Dartmouth College this fall, they were greeted by a campus-wide voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) telephone system, installed by Networked Information Systems (NIS) of Woburn, Mass. The 7,000-phone system–one of the largest deployed by a private, four-year college–will enable Dartmouth to reduce its telecommunications costs, while increasing the flexibility and productivity of faculty, staff and students.

Meanwhile, in Huntington, W.Va., the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has connected its district headquarters, 49 remote sites and floating repair fleet with a single distributed VoIP system that delivers advanced voice services and can be managed remotely from anywhere.

Such VoIP success stories are common today, but concerns about the security of Internet protocol telephony systems may slow adoption of the technology by small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) in the United States, according to research commissioned by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA).

About 300 U.S. businesses with 20-500 employees were polled, with just 48% saying they currently trust the security offered by IP telephony solutions available today. By comparison, 76% of respondents said they trust the security of traditional telephony systems.

The survey also found that delays and disruptions in voice and data communications occur at least monthly for 60% of the respondents, and 70% of those occurrences have a material impact on business.

Despite such misgivings, organizations like Dartmouth College and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are moving forward with VoIP deployments.

Dartmouth College administrators decided to undertake the project two years ago. “Our old TDM PBX was nearing the end of its useful life,” says Robert Johnson, director of voice and data converged systems at the school. “We decided that voice traffic could be provided more strategically and cost-effectively by converging our voice and data networks.”

Dartmouth already had a Cisco Systems data network in place, and that made the transition to a fully converged network relatively straightforward. Nearly 200 additional Cisco switches with power over Ethernet were installed on the campus to ensure voice availability during a power outage, with voice traffic given a priority over data. In addition, a 7,000-user voice mail system was installed, supported by five Microsoft Exchange Servers and a high-end Cisco Unity Server.

Johnson, who managed the VoIP deployment for Dartmouth, advises managers in similar situations to do their homework and choose an implementation partner with a strong track record and the highest certification levels in the technologies they will be integrating.

The Army Corps of Engineers district in Huntington selected a ShoreTel IP telephony system to replace a Centrex system that was costing $30,000 per month for the headquarters office alone. Robert Hall, coordinator of voice and data communications for the district, says, “The VoIP system is easy for us to install and administer, and we make changes on the fly all the time. The biggest installation problem is tracing the old lines, pulling the legacy systems, and doing the paperwork required to cancel the old ISDN lines.”