Whether it’s for a college, university or K-12 institution, networking and IT teams engaged in the management and monitoring of campus networks are facing some big challenges today:
These challenges not only impose a responsibility on school network operations staff to keep networks running smoothly but provide some watchdog duties as well to avoid misuse of network resources. At the same time, professors and teachers are looking to leverage the latest in network-based collaboration and learning tools that incorporate streaming HD audio and video for virtual classroom environments. New applications and methods of communication are constantly added to the mix that can affect network performance without any warning.
What is Needed? Two needs have risen to the top of the list for educational institutions wanting to maintain control of their network. The first is eliminating internal network misuse. The second is preventing security threats originating from outside their networks. Both of these can bring a network to a halt, or worse yet result in data getting compromised. And unlike enterprises, educational institutions (in particular, universities with students living on campus) are particularly vulnerable to cyber attacks, caused by possible gaming retaliation initiated by outside “poor losers” or to the inherent “openness” of an educational network. After all, the latter is what facilitates the free exchange of ideas, making it easier for researchers to engage in worldwide collaboration in pursuit of common research goals. It’s apparent that the need for network security and planning is crucial to educational institutions, but they may not have as large of a budget as enterprises do to efficiently monitor their networks. When budgets are a concern, it’s crucial to find a network monitoring solution that can still scale to monitor the largest, most complex networks without breaking the budget.
Key capabilities of a cost-effective network monitoring solution should include:
A solution that meets these requirements can provide the following benefits:
A big data, SaaS approach is ideal for unifying network data at scale and providing the compute power to achieve these benefits. If you’re interested in learning more about how Kentik’s big data approach enhances network security and planning, check out Kentik for DDoS Protection and Defense solution brief. If you already know that you want to implement a much more cost-effective network security and planning solution for your institutional network, start a free trial.