“SCC has some good Cisco experts behind the scenes, so we approached them to develop a large, important project for us.” – Jonathan Christie, Director of IT, High School of Dundee.
The High School of Dundee is an independent, co-educational day school in Dundee, Scotland founded in 1239. It provides primary and secondary education for around 1000 students. As part of a strategic plan to modernise educational practice and the learning environment, the school’s senior management initiated a project to provide 1000 Apple iPads to staff and students, these devices whilst being owned by the users would be managed by the school. The process of integrating this amount of new devices needed to be easy to manage whilst still maintaining the security of the school’s systems. Access needed to be granular based on whether a user was classed as a member of staff, a pupil or a visitor, and further differentiated based on the pupil’s age group and access technology, which from a child protection aspect is essential when protecting access to internet resources for an age range from 5 to 18 years.
SCC was engaged to provide the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) solution at HSoD which is comprised of the following key Cisco components and configuration elements:
- Cisco Aironet WLAN infrastructure – This allowed features such as Central Web Authentication for guest users, device registration for BYOD users and NAC compliancy for Windows and Apple Mac devices;
- Cisco Identity Services Engine – Deployed on a dedicated hardware appliance, this was integrated with the school’s Active Directory (AD) to allow user and computer based authentication lookups;
- Cisco Web Security Appliance – Deployed in transparent mode on the network perimeter to protect user traffic in and out to the internet via the Cisco ASA firewall. The uptake on the BYOD solution is evident by the fact there are around 800 devices registered on the ISE system, these are mostly iPads (around 600) with a mix of iPhone, Android, Windows (7 and 8) and Mac OSX devices.
”We needed a system that would encompass both our desktop and our wireless filtering, so one of the positives that came from it was that we can have one single solution for our content filter” – Jonathan Christie, Director of IT, High School of Dundee.
The solution delivered by SCC brings together the components detailed above to create a truly mobile experience that provides user access throughout the school as well as varying levels of access based on the user’s identity. All school users are restricted by features such as Safe Search for Google and Bing search engines whilst blocking other search engines from being accessed. Advanced features such as Web Based Reputation and Anti-Malware are enabled to provide high levels of protection from web-based threats.