ConSentry Intelligent Control Reduces CAPEX and OPEX for Fayetteville State University.

University Reports Strong First-Year Results From LANShield Platforms Deployed at the LAN Access Edge

MILPITAS, Calif. -- One year after deploying ConSentry intelligent control in its LAN, Fayetteville State University (FSU) reports dramatic operational and manpower savings; lower incidence of malware, bots, and other security headaches; and better uptime, allowing staff more time to focus on strategic projects instead of reacting to network outages and problems. The North Carolina university swapped out its Cisco Clean Access gear and 3750 switches for ConSentry LANShield[TM] platforms last October, and to date reports the following major benefits:

* Management costs and troubleshooting time have dropped dramatically

* Support calls from new students fell from 200 calls a day for the Clean Access deployment to only 20 calls per week with ConSentry

* The incidence of electronic download and copyright violations is down, as the network team now has the visibility to enforce security policies and provide audit trails of illicit activity to the university's legal department

* IT personnel spend less time reacting to issues and more time on proactive network planning

* Total hardware costs were lower than competitor's more complicated approach

"Before we were always responding to outages and problems," said Joseph Vittorelli, director of systems and infrastructure at FSU. "Now my team can focus on network redesign and upgrade projects, rather than frantically chasing bits around. With ConSentry's intelligent control architecture, we have complete visibility and data on where users go on the network and what they do, so we can enforce policies, understand traffic trends, and react quickly to reduce infections on the network."

(Click here to view Joseph Vittorelli discussing deployment details on site at FSU: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcH9V55gFIw)

Intelligent Control over Users and Applications

The ConSentry deployment at FSU consists of 54 LANShield Switches serving the student resident halls and four LANShield Controllers in the office administration buildings. Because FSU maintains an open computing environment, Vittorelli and his team needed a way to safeguard university assets and intellectual property without restricting student access to authorized resources and the Internet. Originally the network team chose Clean Access NAC appliances to address this need, but after enduring 18 months of problems and outages, Vittorelli opted to move to ConSentry last fall and completed the migration in May.

ConSentry intelligent control gives the FSU network team visibility into every flow on the network, enabling them to identify users by username and by their associated roles and to know the application involved, at Layer 7. LANShield platforms can automatically recognize devices on the LAN, identify what applications a user or device is running, and track what the user is trying to do - down to the filename or URL involved. This capability has radically improved the network team's ability to prevent malware infections from spreading, including a recent bot attack originating from Amsterdam that threatened to lock up networks across campus.

"You need to know who and what is on your network in order to control it," said Vittorelli. "Today we can fix in minutes or hours problems that would have taken us days or weeks to isolate and correct before."

More Functionality for Lower Cost

Vittorelli did not have to pay a premium for more granular control of his applications and users. In fact he has reaped both capital and operational savings with the ConSentry platforms, because the same port that connects his users to the LAN gives him full control over what each user can do.

"We had budgeted for NAC replacement and a later Cisco access switch upgrade, but ConSentry integrates NAC directly into the switching fabric, so we actually made the upgrade for less than we allocated," said Vittorelli. "But the capital savings aren't even our biggest gain. My networking team has only three people serving a network of 8000 users. ConSentry intelligent control has freed us to do projects we never could have accomplished before, such as our complete network redesign over this past year to move to private IP addressing. It's really the operational savings that provide us the highest return on our investment in ConSentry."

Tags and Keywords

LANShield platform, intelligent control, network access control, identity-based access control, user and application security

About ConSentry Networks

The ConSentry Networks Intelligent Control architecture delivers native user and application control at the LAN access edge. With this technology, ConSentry's award-winning LANShield product family enables IT managers to improve the visibility, control, and performance of users and applications and radically simplify LAN deployment and operations. ConSentry is backed by blue-chip venture capital firms Accel Partners, DAG Ventures, INVESCO Private Capital, and Sequoia Capital and is headquartered in Milpitas, California.

ConSentry Networks, the ConSentry Networks logo, and LANShield are trademarks of ConSentry Networks Inc., for use in the United States and other countries. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective holders.