The Cayman Islands Ministry of Education, Employment, and Gender Affairs, along with the Department of Education Services, is responsible for 10 primary schools, three high schools, the Cayman Islands Further Education Centre, and a school for students with special needs. The Cayman Islands Government Education System employs more than 500 staff and serves over 5,100 students from reception programs (Kindergarten) to year 12.
The Story
Protect a 3,000 Device Fleet From Theft
The Cayman Islands Ministry of Education, Employment, and Gender Affairs has approximately 3,000 devices distributed among 6,000 users. In addition to its Laptops for Students Program, the Ministry also runs a Teacher Laptop Program, issued for the length of the employee’s contract. Like many education administrations, the Ministry has found the introduction of electronic devices to be a motivational and efficient means to improve student learning and research.
These devices are Ministry assets and require an added level of protection. A number of device thefts instigated the search for a solution that would help the Ministry retrieve these devices and serve as a deterrent for future theft. With 3,000 devices spread across more than 6,000 students and teachers, a stolen laptop represented not only a lost investment but a roadblock to student progress.
Security Challenges
Protects Students
And Devices
Saves
Time
Safeguards
IT Budgets
"We were looking for an extra level of protection. We saw Absolute Secure Endpoint as an additional step in our due diligence for not only the peace of mind but the protection of our staff and students."
STEVEN DURKSEN
ICT MANAGER
CAYMAN ISLANDS MINISTRY OF EDUCATION
The Solutions
How They Did It
Unbreakable, Always-On Connections Help Recover Stolen Devices
“The key differentiator was Absolute Persistence® technology, built into the firmware,” said Steven Durksen, ICT Manager. “The first thing a thief will do is reimage the device, so we knew that having that tamper-proof connection would be critical to recovering the device.”
The results have been incredible. According to Mr. Durksen, “Absolute Security has worked with law enforcement to help retrieve some of our devices, even devices that called in from neighboring countries. We didn’t realize that Absolute Security had relationships with law enforcement internationally—it was a pleasant surprise when devices were recovered outside of our region.”
Geofencing Capabilities Help Manage Deployment
Being an island nation, creating geofences is of incredible value. Setting geographical parameters enables the Ministry to manage its deployment and ensures that devices do not travel beyond the three islands that make up the Cayman Islands.
Automated Reports Helps Save IT Valuable Time
From an asset management perspective, Absolute Secure Endpoint has helped reduce manual reporting. “The automated reporting is an easy and effective way for us to monitor our assets,” Durksen said. “It highlights missing and suspicious devices; it gives us a useful summary. It’s also a great complement to the other management solutions we use.”
The Results
Protect Students and Devices While Safeguarding IT Budget
Through Absolute Secure Endpoint, the Ministry was able to protect devices and students better, save time, and safeguard its IT budget.
For the Cayman Islands Ministry of Education team, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Discourages theft for a safer learning environment
- Recovers stolen devices, so replacement costs can be redirected to meaningful learning initiatives
- Provides automated reports to provide IT with oversight across the entire deployment
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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Mitigating Zero-Day Threats in a Complex Cybersecurity LandscapeLive Webinar - Sept 17, 2024 | 9AM PT
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