Wayne State Deploys Q1 Labs QRadar to Manage and Secure Network

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 08/15/08

Wayne State University (WSU) has chosen Q1 Labs' QRadar to analyze, visualize, and assess their networks, all while adhering to specific compliance regulations. WSU is a research university with 33,000 graduate and undergraduate students.

When the university's network management team started having correlation issues within its network, they began searching for a solution that could monitor and detect all types of traffic running on its network while also identifying problems that required immediate remediation.

"With QRadar, we are able to immediately respond to potential issues that would have previously been more difficult to detect," said Joseph Sawasky, CIO and associate VP for Computing & Information Technology at the university. "With more than 50,000 hosts to monitor, it was traditionally very complex and time-consuming to find and address all issues. QRadar offers one complete view of our network environment and provides us with a prioritized ranking based on the importance of the host, severity of an event, and the threat credibility. QRadar's ranking capability is also completely tailored to our environment, so we determine what is important rather than the system doing it for us. Bottom line:  the product is helping Wayne State University do much more with less - essentially being a more efficient organization."

QRadar handles network monitoring of threats on student PCs and remediation of security incidents; development and enforcement of security policies on university-owned IT assets that maintain confidential or sensitive information and auditing of access to these systems; and improved ability through application monitoring and behavioral analysis to detect rogue or inappropriate applications according to defined policies. Compliance features include log management, network and security policy monitoring and enforcement, and compliance reporting.

Wayne State is currently planning a move to a distributed deployment model to monitor university-wide inter-hub traffic and has plans to expand the use of QRadar to its medical campus in 2009. The university joins 50 other institutions of higher ed, including Harvard University, Cornell University, and Stanford University, that use QRadar.

www.harvard.edu/
www.cornell.edu/
www.stanford.edu/