William Woods University Resolves User Issues in 15 Minutes and Limits Damage from Ransomware

The university replaces time-consuming manual processes to increase the IT team’s productivity and strengthen data security

Irvine, CA, June 6, 2017

Netwrix Corporation, provider of a visibility platform for user behavior analysis and risk mitigation in hybrid environments, announced today that William Woods University uses Netwrix Auditor to make IT operations more efficient and mitigate the risk of data exposure.

William Woods University is a private liberal arts university located in Fulton, Missouri, U.S. Its large IT infrastructure is distributed across three campuses. The university’s IT team of two people ensures that over 5,000 students and employees have seamless access to systems, applications and files. In order to efficiently resolve user issues and avoid disruptions to operations, the understaffed IT team needed to replace manual log monitoring with an automated solution that would bring more visibility into core systems, such as Active Directory and file shares.

After evaluating several solutions, William Woods opted for Netwrix Auditor for its ease of deployment and use, reasonable licensing model and modularity. With the solution, the university’s IT team accomplished the following goals:

• Resolving user issues faster. Most common user problems, such as account lockouts after multiple failed logons, are now investigated and resolved very quickly. Moreover, the IT team values their ability to pull out information about any incident, even one from the distant past, and quickly find the root cause.
• Optimizing file storage. Netwrix Auditor enabled the IT team to clean up shares that contain nine terabytes of data and millions of files for better organization and performance. The solution also spotted a poorly coded application that made 6,000 changes to file shares daily instead of the average of 10, degrading system performance.
• Maintaining the least privilege principle. The software enabled the IT team to identify accounts with too many access permissions. Removing those excessive rights helped minimize overexposed data and mitigate the risk of destructive attacks, such as ransomware.

"Netwrix Auditor has literally made my administration life easier. With the product, I can find an issue and resolve it in 15 minutes or less, whereas before it was at least 15 minutes just to get to the point that I could start reading the logs. With just two of us on the infrastructure site, I always want administration to be as simple as possible, because I manage way too many things. A product that can make my life easier is money well spent," said Robert Harrison, Server Administrator at William Woods University.

"Given the pivotal role that IT systems play in educational processes today, it is critical to ensure system and data availability. However, it is almost impossible for the usually understaffed IT teams to control a large, dynamic and geographically dispersed environment and ensure normal operations on their own. Solutions that automate user activity monitoring give IT teams a better understanding of what’s going on in their systems, making detection of issues and troubleshooting prompt and straightforward," said Michael Fimin, CEO and co-founder of Netwrix.

Netwrix Auditor is a visibility platform for data security and risk mitigation that enables control over changes, configurations and access in hybrid IT environments. The unified IT platform provides security analytics for detecting anomalies in user behavior and investigating threat patterns before a data breach occurs.

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

About Netwrix Corporation

Netwrix Corporation was the first vendor to introduce a visibility and governance platform for hybrid cloud security. More than 160,000 IT departments worldwide rely on Netwrix to detect insider threats on premises and in the cloud, pass compliance audits with less effort and expense, and increase productivity of IT security and operations teams. Founded in 2006, Netwrix has earned more than 100 industry awards and been named to both the Inc. 5000 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500 lists of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. For more information, visit www.netwrix.com

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Media contact:

Erin Jones
Avista PR for Netwrix
Phone: 704.664.2170

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