Business Challenges

One of the largest universities in South India, catering to over 15,000 students across varied disciplines such as medicine, engineering and management, was grappling with downtimes and security breaches as a result of viruses, worms and other threats, which resulted in a poor Internet experience for their students, preventing them from using the Internet for productive work. The university's IT staff were overburdened in trying to cope up with the remediation of these problems, right from cleaning infected workstations, to preventing network security breaches. They approached Quadra for a solution to their myriad security problems.

Quadra at work

Our security team quickly identified  the main source of concern as the Internet gateway, which was highly insecure, and lacked the content management functionality that was essential in handling this size of a network. We also took a holistic view of their security landscape, and suggested a process driven approach to security, apart from suggesting a point solutions that would provide integrated protection.

A primary need was that the solution should be easy to manage and administer, while being flexible and scalable to accommodate the University's growing needs. Based on a thorough assessment of their current and projected needs, and after taking into account the usage scenarios across the student community, we came up with a solution. Deployment began with understanding the entire network topology, and plugging inherent holes in the network security to increase the effectiveness of the appliance.  Our security team redesigned and re architected the network for maximum security and availability, while at the same time not compromising on end user experience.