Background: Securing a Vast, Distributed Learning Network
Since 1972, South Korea’s largest distance-learning university has provided courses to over 180,000 students across 13 campuses and 32 learning centers nationwide. With a multitude of students accessing its network from various remote locations, the university faced unique security challenges. The primary concerns included ensuring effective user authentication, maintaining comprehensive network management visibility across all remote sites, and implementing robust access control for a diverse range of users and device types.
Streamlining Access and Enhancing Visibility for a Massive User Base
The university specifically sought a comprehensive Network Access Control (NAC) solution to address several key challenges:
- Lack of Network Visibility: Incomplete insight into devices across all campus environments.
- High Management Overhead: Significant time and resources required for user authentication, especially while managing over 1 million student records daily.
- Real-time Security Posture Assessment: Difficulty in checking the security posture of every device accessing the network during pre/post-admission processes in real-time.
- Inefficient IP Address Management: Challenges in managing IP addresses for both known and unknown users and devices.
Solution: Genians NAC Delivers Centralized Control and Enhanced Visibility
Genians provided the university with a secure user authentication and authorization process, seamlessly accommodating BYOD and Guest access while offering improved IP address management. The Genians NAC solution delivered:
- Enhanced Network Visibility: Improved visibility for all endpoint devices across remote sites using Genians’ non-disruptive sensing technology. This instantly identifies and classifies any new, unknown, and rogue devices.
- Consolidated Authentication: Streamlined user authentication by integrating Genian NAC seamlessly with the university’s intranet, consolidating multiple authentication methods.
- Efficient IP Address Management: Managed IP addresses efficiently using built-in DHCP and IPAM features.
- Real-time Security Posture Check: Continuously checked the security posture of all university-owned Windows machines in real-time and enforced the university-required software stack if missing.
- Proactive Device Control: Automatically blocked any unknown and rogue devices attempting to access via wired and wireless networks.
- Quarantine & Remediation: Isolated and remediated non-compliant or compromised devices to maintain network hygiene.
Summary: Optimized BYOD, Seamless Access, and Cost Savings
Genians provided the university with centralized and comprehensive user authentication, BYOD, and Guest access control processes, along with efficient IP address management and enhanced network visibility for their entire campus complex. This was achieved without disturbing the existing network infrastructure.
Achieving High Compliance and Operational Efficiency
The university can now ensure that all users and devices operate at the highest compliance levels in real-time. Additionally, by integrating with Genians’ NAC solution, the university is now able to maximize intranet usage and reduce operating costs, proving a scalable and highly effective security solution for large, distributed learning environments.
