Security Sleuths

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Security Sleuths

8/25/2005

By Matt Villano

In just a few short weeks, the new system already has paid huge dividends. In years past, the first few weeks of school were harrowing for staffers on the Westminster help desk; troubleshooters worked 12- and 14-hour days answering questions from students about updates they missed during the summer months. This year, however, Stock says the calls slowed to a trickle, with only five calls for every 175 students. The initial rollout of CleanAccess has had such an impact that Stock says he's already working with CDW·G representatives to research what other kinds of policies the technology can administer.

"I had no idea this would work so well," he says. "The way I see it, the possibilities for what happens next are endless."

Switching Gears

While Barton and Westminster already have wrapped up their security makeovers, Houston Community College (TX) is just getting started. There, J'e DiFlavio, information technology project coordinator, is overseeing a complete network redesign that incorporates switches from Enterasys Networks (www.enterasys.com) to harden security. DiFlavio didn't engineer the project on his own; because the switch market is crowded with so many players, he turned to CDW·G for guidance on the most appropriate and cost-effective switches and on installation techniques that would save time and money. In the end, the group chose Enterasys and worked to phase in new switches while they phased out the old ones.

This all began in the summer of 2004. Houston had been hit with a number of viruses that year, and board members recognized that they needed to address security issues by improving the security of the network infrastructure itself. The board called upon CDW·G for a primer on the switch market and quickly learned that Enterasys switches would provide requisite security at a fraction of the cost of some of the other products. Better still, CDW·G representatives convinced DiFlavio and his colleagues that the switches from Enterasys could be used on the front end of the network and could be painlessly incorporated with existing Cisco routers.

"The ability for Cisco and Enterasys to work together was critical," DiFlavio says. "I'm not sure we would have even known it was possible without the right kind of guidance."

At first, getting the devices from competing vendors to work together proved to be difficult. Due to differences in the operating systems, the Cisco switches weren't communicating with their Enterasys counterparts, slowing traffic to a crawl. But, following the implementation, CDW·G team members stayed on campus to help Houston technologists troubleshoot the situation. At one point, CDW·G even called in an engineer from Enterasys to take a look. Finally, after days of work, group members resolved the problem. Today, information flows smoothly around the campus network, from Cisco switches to Enterasys switches and back again.

Still, according to DiFlavio, the job of upgrading and redesigning the Houston network is far from complete. With only 30 percent of the conversion finished, CDW·G will return after Sept.