Email threats, including phishing scams and ransomware, are prevalent in the education sector. This has led educators to search for better defenses.
These include Coomera Anglican College, a coeducational K-12 school on the Gold Coast that has bolstered its defenses by adopting Barracuda’s cloud security solutions. The rollout shows how other schools could also improve their protections against cyber threats.
Coomera had a number of security issues with the legacy system before adopting Barracuda solutions, according to IT services manager Darryl Hall. Chief among them were victims of email threats such as phishing scams exposing user credentials and ransomware. “A data breach can cause long-term reputational damage, create doubts and loss of trust within the community, which impacts our ability to attract new families to the College,” he says. .
Coomera’s security was already relatively good before the Barracuda solutions were rolled out, but there was definitely room for improvement, Hall says. “We had enterprise-grade firewalls, endpoint protection, and email filtering. We were also the first to adopt security awareness training and campaigns to equip our staff with cybersecurity knowledge.
However, current security measures did not detect all potential threats, so there were ongoing concerns about email attacks. Additionally, by adopting cloud-based services, the College needed to implement new security policies and provide more staff training.
Barracuda solutions adopted by the College are designed to stop known spam, viruses and malware using artificial intelligence. They are used worldwide by more than 200,000 organizations in education, healthcare, retail and financial services.
Traditionally, organizations hosted databases onsite and staff needed to access data onsite or remotely using a VPN connection. Migration of databases to the cloud allows easy public access through web applications, but Coomera has had to deploy additional layers of security to protect against compromised user accounts and improve its multi-factor authentication capabilities, says Hall. .
Alliance Business Technologies (ABT), a Brisbane-based managed IT services provider, has worked with Barracuda to successfully address the challenges of a wide variety of organizations facing a myriad of security threats in an Office 365 environment.
“Through our trusted partnership with the College,” says Jarred Jenkins, Architect of ABT Solutions, “ABT was able to offer valuable proof of concept and demonstrate the uniqueness of the solutions to the College. We replaced their security gateway and included an AI component, which is essential for the school’s simulation and training.”
“In addition, we were able to group together Security Awareness Training (formerly Barracuda PhishLine), Barracuda’s security and awareness platform, along with other tools, while providing the best security gateway and backup solutions they didn’t have at the time. »
Phishing attacks have become more compelling than ever, making them harder to spot. At the same time, attackers are increasingly targeting unsecured personal email accounts. As a last line of defense, employees need to better detect social engineering phishing attacks, and security awareness training provides cutting-edge user awareness.
Additionally, he provided much-needed safety training resources for Coomera students, Hall said. “We teach our students the techniques used by hackers and identifying a scam is a life skill they can use when they become adults,” he says.
A convincing solution
Barracuda’s solutions are designed specifically to stop known spam, viruses and malware using artificial intelligence that leverages its global threat intelligence system, which collects real-time threat data from from millions of collection points worldwide. It also includes a subscription to Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection designed as a cloud-based service that uses a multi-layered architecture with a CPU emulation sandbox to detect and block new (zero-day) and advanced, evasive threats.
The College has benefited in several ways from the integration Barracuda Email Protection (formerly Barracuda Total Email Protection) in its managed services architecture. “The solution plan we have is complete. It covers all of our requirements for Office 365 email protection and backup, cybersecurity staff training and threat remediation. We are often hampered by navigating through multiple management portals, so it’s a benefit to be able to manage a multitude of features from a single, easy-to-use management platform,” says Hall.
He’s also impressed with the artificial intelligence behind Barracuda Email Protection. “Having an intelligent system that knows the behaviors of our staff and can create email alerts when unusual events occur is like having an extra team member monitoring all email traffic,” says- he.
“We’ve also benefited from adding additional layers of security, peace of mind for our users, and a full suite of tools for our support team to troubleshoot issues. The biggest cybersecurity threat is human error, and Barracuda Email Protection has provided the means to protect our organization against email threats with its multiple layers of protection. This allows us to quickly and efficiently identify and resolve these issues with ease and confidence.
For more information contact solution partner Barracuda Business Technology Alliance.
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