Confidence in McAfee Endpoint Security Drives Widespread Adoption Across Australian School System
The 103 Catholic schools overseen by Catholic Education South Australia (CESA) can use whichever endpoint security they choose. They have the option to purchase endpoint protection at a per-user or per-node cost from a CESA team that designs and delivers school-centric technology services. But they are also free to turn to other solutions.
In the past, only half of the 20,000 protectable endpoints in the region subscribed to the endpoint protection that the CESA services team provided. However, after the team switched endpoint protection to McAfee Endpoint Security (ENS) and the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator® (ePO™) central management console, schools began signing up to receive the new endpoint protection.
According to Simon Sigré, senior network engineer and technical lead for the CESA technology services team, word spread quickly as site IT administrators and users of McAfee ENS were delighted with the improvement in protection and ease of management. Sigré also posted on the CESA Twitter feed every time ENS successfully thwarted a cyberattack. Within months, CESA had doubled the number of endpoints served to 20,000.
Sigré and the technology services team ultimately deployed McAfee ENS version 10.2 across 93 of the 103 sites, easily migrating 4,000 nodes per day. At an additional site, the team is piloting ENS version 10.5, which boasts additional improvements in performance and Real Protect machine learning and behavioral analysis detection capabilities. Sigré looks forward to upgrading all the desktops with ENS 10.2 to ENS 10.5 in the near future to take advantage of these additional enhancements.
Easier Jobs, Greater Visibility and Coverage, and Superior Detection
Why did CESA schools overwhelmingly sign up and pay to be protected by McAfee Endpoint Security? Two main reasons.
First, McAfee ENS provides superior detection and blocking. Sigré points to the ability to build behavioral rules to adapt to unique use cases as one way that ENS has strengthened CESA’s defense. For instance, over a span of nine months, the McAfee ENS behavioral detection configurations designed by the team stopped infections from 32 separate phishing campaigns masquerading as AGL (Australian Gas & Light utility) bills or Australian Post parcel collection notices. ENS prevented countless ransomware infection attempts from these campaigns by preventing them from executing their initial JavaScript, potentially saving days that would have been spent in remediation.
Second, McAfee ENS makes site IT administrators’ jobs easier. Authorized administrators can log in to McAfee ePO anytime, whether or not they are within the CESA network, to see pertinent security information they need to do their job as efficiently as possible. In addition, the CESA School Support team, (another as-a-service offering provided by CESA), can continually monitor the security posture of the 70 sites it supports.
Furthermore, greater visibility and coverage enabled by McAfee ePO makes the entire school system safer. “By consolidating many separate consoles to one centralized console, we now have multiple sets of eyes looking at the same console, whether onsite or on the services team,” explains Sigré. “It’s a collective effort. As a result, we no longer have nodes falling through the cracks.”
“We haven’t had a CryptoLocker outbreak in six months,” concludes Sigré. “With McAfee Endpoint Security, we have more visibility, more coverage, and more customer confidence than we have had in 12 years.”
To read the full case study of CESA’s experience with McAfee Endpoint Security and McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator, click here. Get your questions answered by tweeting @McAfee.
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