With more use of interactive lessons, BYOD, remote access from home and greater network and internet security within Schools, IT departments are feeling the pressure. Here are 8 key building blocks to put in place to help keep your networks performing well.

1. 8 Building Blocks for a High
Performance School Network
© Copyright 2014 Modrus

2. The Problem
2

3. The Problem
3
Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Facebook
“Our policy at Facebook is literally to hire
as many talented engineers as we can
find. There just aren't enough people who
are trained and have these skills today.“
Eric Schmidt
Executive Chairman, Google
“For most people on Earth, the digital
revolution hasn't even started yet. Within
the next 10 years, all that will change.

4. The Problem
4
Greater network
and internet
security
Better monitoring
of who is
accessing what
Wider use of video
and graphical
content
Providing universal home
access for staff and students
Students and staff wanting to
connect to different kinds of
devices
Current pressures on School IT teams:

5. 5
So, how can you
keep your school
networks on the
rails?

6. The Problem
6
Users typically lose up to
30 minutes a day waiting for
PC’s to load or reboot
(Gartner, 2009)
86% of users across Europe, Asia
and North America lose 18 hours
productivity or more a month. (Forrester,
April 2013)

7. The Problem
No. users affected
x
average cost per user
x
lost productivity %
100 staff
£25k average cost pp
Half an hour a day = 6% of working week
7

8. The Problem
No. users affected
x
average cost per user
x
lost productivity %
£150,000 lost per year
8

9. The Problem
9
Lowers both
staff and
student
morale

10. The Problem
10
Decreases
work
satisfaction

11. The Problem
11
Increases
stress in the
IT dept

12. The Problem
12
Loss of user
confidence
in IT Dept

13. So How Does Poor IT
Performance Impact
You?

15. 8 Building
Blocks

16. Protecting whom from what?
• How do you make sure the right people can
access the right files?
• How can we stop the wrong people accessing
the wrong files?
• How do we separate student and staff networks
whilst enabling staff to appear on both?
• Where do we put the intelligence that manages
our network access rules?
16
1 Security

17. What does good security look like?
Correct
Access
Permissions
• The right people
access the data they
need
• The wrong people
don’t have access to
anything they
shouldn’t

18. 18
Give authorized
users a secure
environment
• Users cannot do
anything that may
compromise their
environment
• No admin rights for
standard users

19. 19
A good method
for elevating
permissions for
super-users
• A secure and
managed process for
raising the permission
levels of users

20. 20
Reviewing
access
• Do people who have
left or moved roles still
have access to data?

21. 21
Strong security
at the edge or
border
• Firewalls to block
external access
• VLANs to separate
networks

22. 22
Certificates to
encrypt/
decrypt data
• Ensuring nothing gets
modified in transit

23. What’s actually going around our
network?
• Is your network a free-for-all where
“whoever gets there first gets the most”?
• Is more use of live streaming, video data
and digital photography in learning vastly
increasing your network traffic?
23
2 Resources

24. What does good network management look like?
Visibility of
performance
• Monitor switches
• Alerts on thresholds of
usage

25. 25
Regular usage
reviews/
capability
checking
• Is the school running
low on ports?
• Do you need to
organise more
switches now and
reduce delays to
users when more
capacity is needed at
short notice?

26. 26
Where are the
performance
bottlenecks?
• Are uplinks from edge
switches able to cope
with demand?

27. 27
Quality of
service
• Can performance be
improved by
identifying different
data types and
prioritising?

28. How can we connect anything
anywhere and still manage it?
• How many people are likely to want to
connect and where?
• How do you manage staff and students
bringing their own devices to connect to
your network?
• How do you authenticate and track users
and focus on what is safe for them to
access?
28
3 Wireless

29. What does good wireless management look like?
Appropriate
levels of access
depending on
connection type
• Monitor switches
• Alerts on thresholds of
usage

30. 30
Performance
monitoring,
specifically
capacity and
coverage
• Ensure you have
enough bandwidth or
throughput to cope
with demand
• Ensure you can get a
strong wireless signal
in all required areas
and not available
elsewhere

31. How can they get securely and
simply connected in?
• How do you control how visiting
teachers, parents and students connect
to the internet?
• How do you separate that network from
the core staff and students?
• How can you ensure guest devices and
traffic are secure?
31
4 Guests

32. What does good guest management look like?
Separation of
networks
• Only access limited
services, if any
• Undertake regular
penetration testing

33. 33
Guest access is
simple and
supports a wide
variety of
connecting
devices
• They just work without
needing the IT team’s
intervention

34. So what is happening where and
when?
• How do you diagnose the symptoms
when you hear “my connection is slow”?
• How can you monitor:
– Which devices are doing what?
– How much bandwidth is being used ?
– Which websites are being accessed?
34
5 Monitoring & Reporting

35. What does good monitoring look like in schools?
Automatic
discovery
• Changes and
upgrades to devices
get automatically
factored in

36. 36
Smart
classification
and mapping
• Classify devices and
map your network
• Helps identify
bottlenecks
• Pinpoints devices
which might be
causing problems

37. 37
Performance
monitoring
• You must be able to
monitor available
resources, bandwidth
and device uptime
• Controlled re-starts of
devices can help
banish glue in
performance

38. 38
Intelligent
alerting
• You can’t watch
everything every
minute
• Alerts that make you
aware of a situation
before it becomes
critical

39. 39
Scalability and
failover
• Can you keep up with
demands?
• Build in redundancy
as part of the solution
to prepare for outages
and hardware failure
of your monitoring
solution

40. What are they and how do we avoid
them?
• How do we ensure the essential
protection from:
– Worms
– Trojans
– Spyware
– Adware
– Bots
40
6 Viruses & Malware

41. What does good Virus & Malware protection look like?
Up to date virus
and malware
definitions
• Check at least hourly
for new digital
signatures

42. 42
Regular,
scheduled virus
scans on
devices

43. 43
Email scanning
outside of your
network
• On cloud based
services etc.
• Makes sure viruses
don’t get as far as
your network

44. 44
AV Scanning on
firewalls
• Prevent viruses
getting in at the border

45. 45
Subscribing to
virus alerts and
notification
services
• Keep up to date with
latest news
• Global comms means
geography is no
longer a barrier to
virus infection

46. Homework from home?
• Can your students, staff and in some
cases parents access school
resources from home?
• Access to virtual desktops from
home
• Access to webmail from home for
staff and students
46
7 Remote Access

47. What does good remote access look like?
High level of
security in the
access method.
• Is a simple username
and password
enough?
• Should you insist on
two-factor
authentication?

48. 48
Encryption on
connections
• Prevent data being
modified in transit

49. 49
Control on what
is accessible
• Limiting what users
access externally

50. 50
Do you allow
data to be
transferred in or
out of the
network?
• Do you monitor data
being transferred?
• Ensures data from a
controlled area isn’t
being moved to an
uncontrolled one

51. What if…?
• How do you ensure data doesn’t get
lost or corrupted?
• Do you have a rigorous regime of
regular maintenance and updates?
• Do you have more than one server?
51
8 Resilience

52. What does good remote access look like?
No single points
of failure
• Never have just one of
something
• Find ways to put
things in more than
one location

53. 53
Physical
redundancy
• Have additional
hardware that will take
over in event of failure

54. 54
Is the redundant
solution able to
cope with the
load in a failure
environment?
• E.g. A UPS is
designed to give
enough power to
enable a safe
shutdown – not power
the hardware in case
of failure

55. 55
Geographic
resilience
• Internet lines that
don’t follow the same
route in to the building
• Hardware installed in
different locations

56. So what have
we learned?

57. Networks can be
A pain
Holding us back
Costing us money
A bit tricky

58. Security
Resources
Wireless
Guests
Monitoring & Reporting
Viruses & Malware
Remote Access
Resilience

59. www.modrus.com