Keeping students safer with Cisco Meraki’s end-to-end security

Education IT teams are tasked with not only keeping the network secure, but also with protecting end user devices and ensuring physical safety.

Today’s students are used to seamless connections on campus and in the classroom and are always connected. And while they are preoccupied with completing online school assignments or video chatting with friends, there’s an entire network on the backend making this all possible, which they’re probably not aware of. Schools and colleges are tasked with not only keeping the network secure, which is challenging enough on its own, but also with protecting end user devices and ensuring physical safety of students. All of these serious responsibilities, paired with limited resources, create a challenge for education IT teams.

So how do you protect endpoints, networks, and students, all at the same time?

Cisco Meraki is uniquely positioned to help education IT teams do just that. With solutions that span all three areas, you can ensure student and staff devices are secure, the network is safeguarded from vulnerabilities, student data is protected, and everyone is safe walking around campus — all from one, easy-to-manage location. Below are a few examples that illustrate what Meraki endpoint, network, and physical security can do for your school:

Endpoint Security

As 1:1 programs continue to grow and students bring more devices to campus endpoint security has become increasingly important. With an endpoint management solution, you can protect students of all ages from seeing inappropriate content, accessing blacklisted sites, and downloading unknown applications by using content filtering, group policies, and advanced malware protection. If a device is lost or stolen, especially one holding sensitive information, you can easily identify its location and retrieve it or remote wipe its contents. Most importantly, by protecting all of the devices that students and teachers use every day, the network can remain secure from common endpoint security vulnerabilities.

Network Security

Nearly 80% of headteachers believe their school faces and increased risk of a cyber incident and schools are becoming regular targets for cyber attacks. Cyber criminals often gain access to private student data or important research, and threaten to share this sensitive information. The first line of defence comes by creating group or user-based policies for students, teachers, and staff, and restricting who can access various parts of the network. With integrated intrusion protection and malware scanning, users can easily stop malicious threats and files before they enter the network while prioritizing trusted educational applications with Layer 7 firewall and traffic shaping rules. With increased network visibility, you can track and shut down rogue access points, set up email alerts when rogues are detected, and contain rogue SSIDs, AP spoofs, and packet floods. Most importantly, with Meraki’s cloud-managed MX solution, you can ensure the latest firmware updates are pushed to the network automatically to guard against the latest security threats and vulnerabilities.

Physical Security

Schools are tasked with providing safe learning environments for all students and teachers, without fear of trespassers, poor behaviour, or unforeseen incidents. With smarter security cameras, you can quickly identify when a person is where they shouldn’t be and view video analytics of school activity to identify high-risk areas. You can also help deter threats and incidents with the ability to quickly search recorded video and easily share with parents and law enforcement. With granular access controls and visibility from any Internet browser, teachers, principals, chancellors, and even the fire department can view groupings of cameras, or a single camera, and act accordingly. Plus, with video data encrypted at rest and during transport, you get even more protection against cyber threats.

With the perfect blend of endpoint, network, and physical security, we partner with Cisco Meraki to help provide the safest environment for schools and colleges. We can help you manage all of your security solutions from a single, web-based dashboard so you can simplify device, network, and security camera management through remote configurations, video monitoring, and application deployments.

In addition to wireless and switching, we can provide complete Meraki security solutions including smart cameras and IoT sensors so for your first line of defence, contact us today.