ForeScout Technologies has announced that long-time customer, Queens College, is successfully utilising ForeScout CounterACT to monitor and manage corporate assets, in addition to connecting devices used by its 5,000 faculty and staff, as well as approximately 20,000 students.
Queens College, a senior college of the City University of New York, initially turned to ForeScout to help protect them against the onslaught of advanced threats and propagating worms, which in the past would infect hundreds of computers, literally bringing the network to a crawl.
“Once we had CounterACT in place, the first time a new worm broke out, we had only three computers that became infected, and those were immediately isolated, and the infections contained,” said Morris Altman, director of Network Services at Queens College. “Additionally, those three users were automatically notified about the problem, and instructed to call our help desk so we could fix the problem. Instead of weeks, the problem was solved in less than a day, and had minimal impact on our students, faculty and staff.”
After such a positive experience with the initial implementation, the networking team at Queens College chose to keep ForeScout as its network security solution to gain visibility and control over the users, devices, systems and applications requesting access to and on its networks. This was important, as the college was struggling with maintaining intelligence and security provision of both a large number of college-owned devices, as well as the huge influx of personal devices (BYOD) being used by its employees and students.
“Before we had CounterACT, we really didn’t have clarity on how many devices were accessing our networks,” said Altman. “We discovered all sorts of things, and it’s been a learning experience. We now know that there are about 6,000 wireless and 5,000 wired endpoints at any given time. This knowledge helps us when deploying policies, and gives us the ability to monitor, learn and then make educated decisions.”
As one of ForeScout’s oldest customers, Queens College has updated its network access control (NAC) solution as new versions have been released.
“The BYOD phenomenon is now reality for all institutions of higher education, making already complex network security issues even more challenging,” said Brant Kennedy, senior vice president of Worldwide Sales at ForeScout. “CounterACT’s next-gen NAC solution offers a cost-effective, time-saving approach to gaining complete visibility and control of all devices on the network. We are happy to assist Queens College over the years in achieving paramount network security and uptime.”
