Securing Education Networks in the Digital Era

Securing education networks in this digital era is more important than ever. It’s a distinctive challenge for schools and universities with an inherent mix of users, devices, and zones on the same network. That’s why many businesses are electing to lease Fortinet firewalls to protect their multifaceted networks quickly and inexpensively. Campus firewall rental provides flexibility and strong security without the large initial investment in new hardware.

Academic Use Cases

Schools are not one-size-fits-all when it comes to using digital tools. Students use materials that are part of their coursework, staff send sensitive information and researchers work with confidential data. To keep all this safe:

• Fortinet firewalls can manage “who has access to what resources”
• They offer on the fly threat analysis which can interrupt attacks before spreading.
• Streaming lectures, online testing, and virtual labs are all supported in high-bandwidth requirements
• Schools can scale firewall capacity up or down as needed for academic calendar with rental options

Firewalls on rental also ensure that the institutions are always up to date with the latest security technology. No concerns about the outdated machinery or pricey modifications. Instead, campuses can sign up for enterprise-level protection specifically designed for education.

Zone Segmentation

Zone Isolation

One of the most important steps in protecting any education network is segmentation by zone. It’s a bit like carving up the campus network into smaller pieces you can manage more easily. This minimizes the damages from cyber threats, and makes internet users more secured.

Typical campus zones include:

• Student Access Zone: The area that is used by students to plug in their devices before classes and the use of the internet
• Staff and Faculty Zone: For admin and teaching staff only
• Research Zone: For Data Heavy & Privacy Sensitive Research projects. Safe place for larger or sensitive research projects
• Guest Zone: Provides guests with limited internet connectivity without compromising your core network

It gets the dual nature of the traffic between these zones. Fortinet firewalls are great for enforcing stringent policies between these zones. And this, my friends, is where power of segmentation comes in:

• Prevents malware from spreading latitudinally in zones.
• Increases visibility into network traffic to help you get better response time.
• Enforces particular regulations appropriate to the needs of each zone
• Improves the performance of the whole network by eliminating useless traffic

Organizations in the educational space can easily implement advanced segmentation with rented Fortinet firewalls. A customer would bail for a simple reason: ease of installation/implementation and ongoing support are commonly part of the rental/package offer, and it’s pretty rare to find someone who can so end-to-end that it’s not worth the payback.

Guest Access

Guest access management is a growing headache for campuses. Visitors, vendors or attendees at a conference might legitimately want web access, but never need to poke around in sensitive network sites.

Fortinet firewalls can assist in establishing secure and segmented guest areas. Benefits include:

• One-way-only, isolated guest network with no shared data with main campus zones
• Simple guest authentication portals that allow SMS/Email verification
• Bandwidth cap to prevent bandwidth abuse
• Lets have tokens expire after a few minutes of inactivity.

Rental firewall solutions allow schools and universities to take out of the box, these capabilities. You don’t have to spend a lot on permanent gear that gets used only for visiting guests. The rental model is ideal for those short-term events where demand for networks sky rockets.

Policy Management

How the hell do you manage security policies across a far-flung educational campus? The problem with Firewalls is that many of them have one appliance in Tower A with its own configuration and rules, and then another in Tower B, and another in Tower D, and you have to go into each one to update each rule — Fortinet Firewalls (all other vendors have their solutions for this as well).

Key Policy Management advantages:

• Single dashboard to track and modify rules across the segmented zones
• Policy creation based on user roles, device types, or applications
• Automated and threat response to instantly stop suspicious activities
• Continual updates while you remain in our rental service to ensure that policies reflect the current security level

Past adopter flexibility is important for education organisations encountering evolving user needs. When renting firewalls, training and support in these tools is often offered, allowing internal IT teams to gain control.

Conclusion

To the extent it is humanly possible, there is no longer any choice on campus security for K-12 and higher education. Faced with increasing cyber attacks, they want proven solutions that are both flexible and reliable. It’s a wise decision to rent Fortinet firewalls for education networks. It provides segmented zone protection, secure guest access, and easier policy management and that too at no high costs at the beginning.

Select campus firewall lease to protect and scale your educational institution. Invest in the future of your campus network now with economical Fortinet firewall leasing solutions for school.