A Tool for Growth or a Threat to your networks ? Guest Post By Nitin Vaghela to RitroSoft.Com
Information Technology has become indispensable for every
industry, and the education industry is no different. Use of technology in
education encourages inclusive and collaborative learning environment, among
both students and faculty.
But, like every coin has two sides, use of
Information Technology in education comes with a whole set of concerns and
problems too, and if left unaddressed, these can leave the education institutes
worried about their network
security.
With most institutes offering unregulated internet access, their
networks are at a risk of being used for accessing unhealthy websites like
violence and porn. This unregulated access can result in entry of malware like
spyware and malicious applications, some of which run at the backend, sending
out sensitive network information, also slowing down computers. Applications
like Bit Torrent, P2P and UltraSurf, maybe used for heavy audio, video
downloads, at times using proxy sites that help bypass the web filter deployed by
institutes. These unnoticed applications and unproductive audio, video
downloads running in the network lead to serious bandwidth crunch, which
considerably hampers productive use of Internet in institutes.
Adding to their woes, institutes generally have a shared
computing environment where multiple users share the same system with no
control or record of activities by specific users. In case of a security breach
or network irregularity, all that the institute has is the IP address of the
system used. The institute remains at a loss on information about the user who
actually used the system at the time of breach.
Another alarming concern is ensuring security over wireless
networks in institutes. With more and more institutes providing Wi-Fi access,
incidents of network abuse are increasing considerably due to lack of user
visibility and access controls – tracking who is doing what becomes difficult,
especially in dynamic IP scenarios like that of Wi-Fi. Infected networks are
also used as botnets that broadcast spam or viruses and inability to track the
origin of trouble is yet another problem.
Institutes can safely reap the benefits of Internet by deploying
integrated security solutions like Cyberoam Unified Threat Management. Cyberoam
UTM is a perfect one stop solution, for all these worries. Cyberoam’s Website
Filtering feature, blocks un-needed websites/categories for specific users,
HTTPS websites, Search using specific keywords, etc., using its web
categorization engine that has over 44 million+ URLs grouped into 82+
categories. Cyberoam UTM also educates healthy-usage policy, by providing
customized messages on blocked websites.
Cyberoam offers Bandwidth Management, using which institutes can
allocate bandwidth for each user, based on their roles. Cyberoam’s
Identity-based security controls, allows institutes to define policies based on
usernames, which helps in tracking who did what and when. To know more on
Cyberoam visit www.cyberoam.com
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