School secures students’ PII and ensures system availability

Netwrix Corporation, provider of a visibility platform for data security and risk mitigation in hybrid environments, announced today that Netwrix Auditor empowers Campbell Hall to solidify the security of its IT environment and provide better training to IT staff.

Campbell Hall is an independent coeducational day school for grades K–12, located in North Hollywood, California, U.S. Its IT team has to secure large amounts of personally identifiable information (PII) related to students. Since data compromise could result in bad publicity for Campbell Hall and damage its relations with parents, the IT team was looking for ways to improve the organization’s security posture. Their major concern was enhancing control over Active Directory, which is a backbone of the IT environment. Moreover, senior IT staff needed to ensure that activity of their junior colleagues aligned with internal policies, since improper changes could shut down systems for the school’s 1,400 users.

The IT team chose Netwrix Auditor for its alerts on critical issues and the ‘Who’ aspect of its reports, which is invaluable for troubleshooting and IT staff training. With the software, Campbell Hall gained the following benefits:

• Nearly effortless daily auditing. Detailed information delivered by Netwrix Auditor enables the IT team to check that Active Directory operates correctly and all users can freely access appropriate systems to study and work. In the past, manual audits used to take hours or even days, but the software slashes this time to a couple of minutes a day.
• Immediate detection of malicious activity. The software alerts IT to worrisome activity, such as changes to administrative accounts or powerful groups like Domain Admins, which can be a sign of an attack in progress in near real time, so they can respond immediately.
• Improved IT personnel training. Senior IT members use audit data to make sure that changes made by junior IT staff accord with the school’s security policies.

With Netwrix Auditor, we gained a more complete view of what is going on across Active Directory. Its alerting capabilities that notify me about suspicious events exceeded my expectations. We also improved internal staff policy because now we can make sure that team members do only what they are supposed to do. It is a very powerful and valuable solution that enables us to proactively secure the environment. Netwrix Auditor is definitely something you can rely on.
Alex Roberts, Associate Director of Information Technology at Campbell Hall

Educational organizations have to make sure that the data related to their students is safe, since its compromise can affect their private lives, as well as cause non-compliance issues and harm the school’s reputation. Another challenge is to ensure that activity of IT personnel is authorized and does not cause any system failures that could disrupt teaching processes. Complete visibility into what’s going on across the IT infrastructure enables IT pros to detect out-of-policy or just worrisome activity before it results in a data breach or affects the organization’s business continuity.
Steve Dickson, CEO of Netwrix

To read the complete case study, please visit: www.netwrix.com/go/campbell_hall