Surrey School District required an endpoint security solution for its fleet of 6,000 PCs, 6,000 Apple desktop computers, and 800 notebook computers. The largest school district in British Columbia, Surrey SD welcomes over 77,000 students each day at its 103 elementary schools, 21 secondary schools, and eight learning centers.
The Story
Improve Compliance and Asset Management
Having effective endpoint security and management are tests no school system can afford to fail. The Surrey School District was no exception. The school system had three needs. One was an endpoint security solution that fully supported Apple’s Mac OS X. Two, it wanted to replace the manual process of physically touching every computer to perform inventory checks with an automated method. Finally, as a means to ensure software license compliance and avoid regulatory penalties, Surrey School District was looking for an endpoint security solution to perform regular and accurate checks of every device.
Dan Turner, Director of Information Technology for the Surrey School District, wanted a more efficient method to perform lifecycle management and execute the District’s annual ‘true up,’ which is essentially an inventory count of CPU levels, base bar, and licensing. “With over 100 schools in the District, the true up was an annual headache for my team of 55 in IT services,” he said.
Security Challenges
Maintains
Compliance
Improves
Inventory Management
Saves IT
Time and Money
"Absolute has become a critical tool in allowing us to help the schools ensure they stay onside with software compliance because we can look at our daily reports for verification."
DAN TURNER
DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
SURREY SCHOOL DISTRICT
The Solutions
How They Did It
Automate Annual Inventory Management Process
Rob Gill, Systems Application Specialist at Surrey School District, remembers first-hand the true up process of the past: “Before, 10 to 15 of my colleagues would spend a month and a half—from mid-May to late June—visiting each and every school in the district looking at all the computers to get inventory counts of hardware configurations and installed software titles,” Gill explained.
Now that Absolute Secure Endpoint has completely automated the true up process, Gill and his co-workers can dedicate more time to student and teacher issues rather than administrative.
Daily Reports Help Improve IT Efficiencies
“With Absolute Secure Endpoint, the manual true up has become a thing of the past,” explained Turner. “Each day a computer is booted up, Absolute Secure Endpoint sends any changes to the hardware and software data points. We find out exactly what each computer is running, how much hard drive space is available, whether memory cards are missing, and more. It’s a critical tool for lifecycle management because now, if we want to know if a piece of hardware can support more powerful software, we don’t have to visit the school and sit down at the computer to find out; we know automatically, every day.”
Maintain Compliance With Software License Regulations
Another benefit is helping the District stay onside with software compliance issues. At Surrey Schools, the majority of software licenses are purchased by the District, but some belong to individual schools. “Absolute Secure Endpoint has become a critical tool in allowing us to help the schools ensure they stay onside with software license compliance because we can look at our daily reports for verification,” said Turner.
The Results
Improved Processes Help Save Time and Money
By leveraging Absolute Secure Endpoint, the school district improved lifecycle management, supported software license compliance efforts, and simplified inventory management.
For Surrey School District, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Verifies software license compliance on each device
- Allows the team to understand the hardware and software inventory of every device
- Automates the annual inventory management process
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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