The Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS) supports 200 schools, 8,000 teachers, and 85,000 students. The school district’s mission is to provide the education students need to succeed within the 21st-century workforce. To achieve this, it is critical that students, faculty, and staff have access to the technology, tools, and resources that promote higher achievement and effective communication methods.
The Story
Reducing Risk and Mitigating Device Theft
Through government funding, BCPSS implemented a 1:1 program, offering a device to every student and teacher. However, with especially high crime rates in Baltimore, the IT team had the difficult task of ensuring that all school devices—and the sensitive data they contained—were secured and accounted for.
To address this challenge, the IT team sought a solution that could reduce the risk and cost associated with laptop thefts, maintain an accurate inventory of all district-owned IT assets, and protect the data on teachers’ and students’ devices. In addition, the district wanted to ensure continued funding of its 1:1 program by demonstrating the return on investment for the technology initiative.
Security Needs
Safer Schools
Device Recovery
Data Protection
"We’re focused on bringing technology into every classroom for every student, and we simply couldn’t do that safely without Absolute."
MIKE PITROFF
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
BALTIMORE CITY PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM
The Solutions
How They Did It
Simplifying Asset Management for Thousands of Devices
Mike Pitroff, Chief Technology Officer for BCPSS, knew that the district couldn’t manage the burden of tracking and securing thousands of laptops without assistance. “Absolute Secure Endpoint gave our IT department peace of mind,” explained Pitroff. “It would be impossible for us to manage thousands of laptops without a complete software solution.”
Enhanced Visibility Across All Devices, No Matter Where They Are
Once activated, the Absolute Persistence® technology enabled a constant connection to all devices owned by the district. Tracking is achieved via any Internet connection, regularly collecting asset information from each device regardless of its physical location. This allows administrators to know where laptops are located, who is using them, and what’s installed on them.
Keeping Devices and Data Safe
Absolute Secure Endpoint allows BCPSS to ensure devices and data are always protected. If suspicious behavior is detected and security measures are required, BCPSS’ IT team can use the cloud-based console to remotely freeze the device or delete the data. In the event of a theft, the Absolute Investigations team will engage with local law enforcement to recover the device.
The Results
Protected Devices = Safer Schools
With Absolute Secure Endpoint, the Baltimore City Public School System was able to address its security concerns and embrace technology with a sense of security.
For the Baltimore City Public School System team, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Helps address device theft and tracking concerns
- Provides their IT team with the ability to use a cloud-based console to remotely freeze the device or delete data if suspicious activity is detected
- Gains visibility into how a device is being used, where the devices are, and what is installed on them
Absolute Platform FAQ
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.
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Secure Endpoint
Mitigating Zero-Day Threats in a Complex Cybersecurity LandscapeLive Webinar - Sept 17, 2024 | 9AM PT
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Leveraging AI to Protect Against Modern Cybersecurity ThreatsLive Webinar - Oct 1, 2024 | 9AM PT
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