Cisco Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Firewall Services Module 产品宣传页

Customer Case Study

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

John Carroll University

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Higher Education

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Cleveland, Ohio, United States

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4000 users

CHALLENGE

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Balance need for academic openness with

need to protect information and assets

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Reduce virus and worm outbreaks

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Improve efficiency of IT security personnel

SOLUTION

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Deployed Cisco security solutions to help

ensure that all PCs connecting to the network
comply with university security policies and
cannot propagate viruses or worms.

RESULTS

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Eliminates virus and worm outbreaks on

campus

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Prevents extremely costly manual efforts to

remediate infected PCs

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Improves the manageability of the network and

the efficiency of the IT staff

University Improves Network Security and IT Efficiency

John Carroll University uses Cisco security solutions to reduce information security risks on campus.

Challenge

John Carroll University, located in University Heights, Ohio, is a Jesuit

Catholic university that inspires individuals to excel in learning,

leadership, and service in the region and the world. The university has

3000 undergraduates and nearly 700 graduate students. U.S. News &

World Report’s 2009 college guide ranks John Carroll among the top

10 universities in the Midwest that grant master’s degrees. Originally

founded as St. Ignatius College in 1886, the University was renamed in

1923 to honor America’s first Catholic bishop, John Carroll of

Maryland. John Carroll is one of 28 Jesuit colleges and universities

located in the United States.

The university is committed to providing a state-of-the-art learning

environment for students, providing classrooms with a broad range of

network-enabled multimedia technologies and a wireless network that

blankets the campus. With ubiquitous technology, however, come

significant information security risks.

“As a university, we have to support academic freedom, so we can’t

really lock down the staff or student PCs,” says LaMarr Parker, associate director of network systems, John Carroll

University. “Our challenge is to be open and flexible, yet as secure as possible.”

The biggest challenge was securing the residence halls. The campus has 1000 resident rooms with at least two

Ethernet ports each. This means there is the potential for more than 2000 foreign PCs inside the university network,

none of which can be centrally controlled. Despite the best efforts of the John Carroll IT team, the situation often

meant serious virus and worm outbreaks, some of which were extremely disruptive.

“Several years ago, we had a major virus outbreak that brought our internal network to its knees,” says Parker. “We

had to literally cut off all of the subnets the students were using just to restore connectivity to the Internet and

campus resources. We had about 500 infected PCs on the network.”

The attack crippled the day-to-day network operations of the university and prevented many students from going

online for weeks. But the biggest problem was the operational effort required to clean all the infected PCs.

“We had to physically go to each room and check every PC, at that time, about 1200,” says Parker. “We’re a small

university, and we have an IT department of maybe 30 people. We had the programmers out, the executive director

out, work-study students out. We had every resource that the IT department could muster working 24 hours a day,

trying to get the student PCs patched so they wouldn’t bring down our network. It was devastating. It was six weeks

before we felt as though our heads were above water.”

The university had purchased a site license for an antivirus solution and the rights to provide every student on

campus with antivirus software. But how could the university help ensure that students installed the software and

kept it up to date? And how could they compel students to always patch and update their operating systems (OSs)?