Brisbane Catholic Education is a learning community comprising more than 140 schools that deliver quality learning outcomes to 77,000 prep-to-year-12 students.
BCE's education and administrative workflows are powered by a large and distributed hybrid IT infrastructure.
The organisation also operates the largest non-governmental Microsoft Office 365 tenancy in the Southern Hemisphere.
Meanwhile the community's physical data centre hosts all critical school functions providing library systems maintenance, student support, payroll and much more.
BCE were looking to ensure the strongest protection for student data and personal information, and to safeguard the network, communication links and operational data.
With recent data breaches seen at two large Australian companies, BCE wanted to achieve deeper visibility into data traffic and file attachments to avoid a similar fate and ensure a strong infrastructure to promote support for teaching and learning activities.
A long-time Check Point customer who had already deployed clustered Check Point Quantum Security Gateways to secure its datacentre systems and operations, BCE decided on utilising the full Check Point Quantum Security Gateways, activating all available protections to minimise risk effectively.
The Check Point Quantum Security Gateway cluster is proving to be the security cornerstone of the datacentre, providing full threat - prevention capabilities.
Quantum's remote access VPN features, which enabled BCE to support remote workers during the pandemic, continue to support a hybrid work environment with minimal maintenance.
For an added layer of protection against malicious attachments, BCE leverages SandBlast zero-day protection to inspect all downloads and attachments arriving at the gateways, and extract malicious content before delivery.
Check Point also provides a dedicated Technical Account Manager responsible to fine-tune threat prevention capabilities, roll out new features and assist on other ad hoc projects.
Nitzschner updates the gateways and security policies between school terms, and the TAM works onsite with his team during the first day of a new term to ensure everything works as expected.
With the full range of Quantum's automated features now activated, BCE's IT team can keep up with the latest vulnerabilities with significantly less manual effort, eliminating the need to consistently keep up with the evolving threat landscape.
Check Point automatically updates the gateways to continuously ensure updated security, allowing the team peace of mind and assurance of fighting against the newer security malware.
Nitzschner also highlighted that the filtering of web traffic is now also much more manageable.
Previously, BCE had relied on a third-party server with 16 blades devoted exclusively to inspecting web traffic, but it offered limited visibility.
The team could only see that a server request went out.
Of all the benefits achieved since upgrading the Check Point stack, reliability has been one of the most significant.
Nitzschner said he looked forward to continuing to work with Check Point to maintain security within his organisation's IT infrastructure.
To learn more about how BCE is leveraging Check Point technology, visit: https://www.
This Cyber News was published on blog.checkpoint.com. Publication date: Tue, 09 Apr 2024 14:43:05 +0000