Who is Where on the Network?
Coppin State University (MD) now has an automated, centralized view of their network that facilitates both long-term planning and real-time problem solving. They've deployed
eTelemetry's Locate network appliance, which identifies the name and exact location of each user on the network correlated with their IP address. Coppin State's director of Network Services, Thomas Smith says, "All of our security tools provide alerts based on IP address. Prior to Locate, it was very time consuming from a network forensics standpoint to correlate IPs to the people who use them. Locate gives us these associations in seconds and we can search historical records as well. This functionality is a tremendous time saver for our organization."
Besides using the technology to resolve security events, Coppin State can analyze the real-time and historical information Locate provides for various network planning activities. "With Locate, we know who is connected to each Nortel switch in our network," says Ahmed El-Haggan, VP of Information Technology and CIO. "When we schedule maintenance windows, we know exactly which individuals will be affected by the outage. Locate removes the guesswork involved in identifying these people." El-Haggan also notes that analysis of the utilization histories on Lab PCs along with time-of-day usage patterns can help Coppin State make better decisions about space requirements for labs. "From this perspective, the return-on-investment of Locate is compelling," he comments.