Nevis LANenforcer™ Security Appliances Provide Identity-based Access Control to Protect Sensitive Network Resources From Unauthorized Users
Mountain View, Calif. – June 18, 2007 – Nevis Networks, a market leader in identity-based policy enforcement solutions that secure network resources, today announced that South Orange County Community College District (SOCCCD) is deploying Nevis LANenforcer appliances and LANsight management platforms to secure sensitive server resources from unauthorized access by users at its district office.
The identity-based user access control solution is delivered transparently without any need for client side software or agents to dramatically streamline administrative overhead. SOCCCD also plans a broader deployment of LANenforcer appliances that will control all district user network access. The SOCCCD, comprised of two college campuses, currently serves over 38,000 students and employs more than 2,500 faculty and staff. Irvine Valley College is one of the newest of California’s 108 community colleges and Saddleback College is one of the largest with a student population approaching 25,000.
According to Jeff Dorsz, telecommunications and network security manager with SOCCCD, “Given the sensitivity and volume of the information assets we maintain, coupled with the sheer number of students and faculty that continually seek access to that information, we recognized the need to put new security provisions in place without the cost and headache of having to install and manage endpoint software or agents. Initially, this project started off evaluating internal firewalls but quickly evolved to a network access control initiative with a requirement for both pre- and post-connect user monitoring and control.” What Dorsz and his staff quickly discovered, as a fiscally constrained community college district, was that the cost factors for upgrading firewalls or implementing “NAC” solutions were prohibitive. Equally important, SOCCCD recognized that pre-authentication controls alone were insufficient for securing their network. Without monitoring the ongoing activity of the user and enforcing their access policies to internal resources once they were admitted to the network, the potential for security breaches remained high. “Because our policies are built around user and group definitions, such as segmenting academic and administrative traffic coming into the district data center, we felt it absolutely necessary to have our policy enforcement system linked to user identities, and no other solution could do this as well as Nevis,” Dorsz explained.
To address its need for a cost-effective, identity-based access control solution that proactively enforces pre- and post-connect security policies without impacting network performance or throughput, SOCCCD is deploying Nevis LANenforcers in a phased deployment. “As part of the phase one implementation, all of our users at the main district office on the Saddleback College campus access the network through a LANenforcer,” said Dorsz. “The LANenforcers enable us to distinguish individual student, faculty, administration and ‘guest’ users transparently, in real-time to tightly control which resources they are allowed to access. This ability to distinguish identities includes different classes of users logging in from the same IP address.”
In phase two of its deployment, SOCCCD will implement a data-center protection initiative by installing LANenforcer appliances on additional LAN segments. This will protect key back end servers storing a wide variety of student, academic and administrative data from unauthorized user access across the entire community college district.
The LANenforcers also provide SOCCCD with real-time network visibility for incident reporting purposes to continuously monitor user activity for more robust network security. “We evaluated options from traditional firewall providers and various flavors of NAC solutions, but cost factors, performance issues and scalability limitations eliminated these options,” said Dorsz. “Nevis is providing an identity-based access control solution with complete user transparency for less than half of competing alternatives. This is significant when you consider they’re supplying an identity firewall, real-time traffic visibility, IPS, and event correlation capabilities in a single appliance that scales to support thousands of users.”
About South Orange County Community College District
The South Orange County Community College District, founded in 1967, is one of 72 community college districts in the state of California. The district’s two colleges, Irvine Valley College in Irvine and Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, are fully accredited and offer quality transfer courses, vocational education programs, and continuing education and cultural opportunities. The SOCCCD currently serves over 38,000 students and employs more than 2,500 faculty and staff. For more information, please visit www.socccd.org.
About Nevis Networks
Nevis Networks is a market leader in secure switching and identity-based policy enforcement appliances. The company’s LANenforcer product family transparently enforces identity-based policies in real time within the network fabric, tightly controlling who can access a company’s network and what resources they are permitted to use. Cross-industry customers, ranging from financial services, healthcare, education and defense contractors deploy Nevis LANenforcers to protect sensitive network resources and assets, and significantly reduce the overall costs and time to resolve security breaches and conduct network audits. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, with additional R&D centers in Pune, India and Beijing, China.