Northeastern Illinois University Chooses Symantec

Symantec Corporation announced that Northeastern Illinois University is using a
combination of Symantec’s backup and security software solutions to implement
an IT consolidation program across virtual and physical environments to
simultaneously break down organizational silos, reduce costs, improve backup
and tighten messaging security.

Since the consolidation program has been deployed, Northeastern Illinois
University has improved IT effectiveness and reduced its vulnerability to
malicious email spam exploits.

"Our staff is overburdened with the
challenge of managing existing IT services while addressing new educational and
operational requirements," said Kim Tracy, executive director of
University Technology Services. "Anything
we can do to offload the complexity allows us to focus on improving and
developing new services to help the efficiencies of our faculty and staff and
enhance the educational experience of our students."

Consolidating Backup and Recovery
In an effort to standardize the University’s
IT environment, all backup and recovery was consolidated to Symantec NetBackup.

"No changes were needed to our
backup and recovery infrastructure. It was important to have a unified view
across virtual and physical environments; this is what NetBackup provides,"
said Tracy. "Virtual machine protection is simplified by centralizing backup
across both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, speeding up backup times
through deep API integration."

Cloud-Based Messaging Improves Security, Reduces Costs
The university was inundated with phishing and spear-phishing attacks, consuming
40-50 hours of staff time each month. Plus, with more than 16,000 mailboxes and
80 percent of mail as spam, this translated into traffic and bandwidth issues.
To deal with the onslaught of incoming mail, an additional mail gateway had to
be added, which increased operating expenditures.

"Rather than having 200,000-plus
spam pounding at my mail gateway every day, I wanted to make this someone
else’s problem by moving to a cloud," said Tracy. "There are some things that simply make more
sense if they are in the cloud. Messaging security is one of them."

The university selected Symantec Email Security.cloud as its multiple layers of
scanning technologies provide added protection against both known and unknown
threats. Plus, Symantec’s service level agreement gave the IT team additional
peace-of-mind.

Endpoint Security Software Halts Malicious Attacks
Struggling with periodic
security attacks, the university upgraded to Symantec
Endpoint Protection 12 as it offers defense against all types of attacks for
both physical and virtual systems. Since the upgrade, NEIU hasn’t experienced
any malicious intrusions.

"The centralized security console
provides us with a view across all of our endpoints, enabling us to take a more
proactive approach to endpoint security," said Tracy. "Symantec Endpoint Production 12 has proven
to be much less taxing on our Windows XP and 7 clients, especially at startup
time. Plus, the enhanced virtualization support is a necessary feature as we plan
to virtualize additional servers in the future."