CCS put together a plan to minimize both overall costs to The Forum School while increasing its Cybersecurity and Disaster Recovery footprint. First we deployed our RMM agents to all devices on the network which provided remote access to IT staff, the ability to collect asset details and hardware inventory reports, and introduced Patch Management securing both the Windows OS and Third Party Applications at all times.
We introduced Cisco Umbrella web filtering and Vulnerability scanning to provide perimeter protection on the network. Sentinel One EDR was deployed to all systems providing AI based endpoint security protection.
The Network infrastructure was replaced with state of the art Cisco Meraki Firewalls and Switches.
The Wireless infrastructure was expanded from 7 to 13 high powered Cisco Meraki Access Points and a Point to Point bridge was upgraded between buildings increasing throughput throughout the campus.
Local backups were moved to the cloud ensuring a true Disaster Recovery plan was in place with image based, encrypted backups of the virtual servers run on a nightly basis and verified each morning by CCS staff.
Finally, a costly VMware solution was replaced with Microsoft Hyper-V Virtual Machines and new Dell Enterprise server hardware.
With each upgrade and rollout, the impact was felt not only by the staff but also by the students.
The Forum School takes network security and scalability seriously and was fully prepared to take on increased network usage both during and after the pandemic.
With its fleet of chromebooks, laptops, and workstations, and a strong network at its backbone, The Forum school network remains secure, stable, and scalable for years to come.
