OVERVIEW

Valuable student data makes school districts a lucrative target for hackers. Unfortunately for publicly funded districts, threat protection can be a challenge.

“We have to walk a fine line. We must be secure without taking away from our core mission of educating kids,” says David Bowman Jr., Jordan School District’s systems and security manager.

As the fourth largest school district in Utah, serving more than 56,000 students across 63 schools, Jordan School District needed to update its security solutions to enhance protection of student data and meet compliance. In addition to meeting the requirements of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the district had added new technologies over the years that required increased emphasis on data security.

CHALLENGES

Bowman and his security team recognized the district’s security landscape has changed dramatically over the years, and that its existing security solution, deployed five years prior, had not evolved significantly. Their previous solution slowed down district devices and networks and could not meet the school’s increasingly stringent compliance requirements.

“We needed something more adaptive and real-time to match the current threat landscape. We also needed to quantify what we were getting for what we were spending. Our existing provider’s systems didn’t give us the protection, analytics, data, reporting, or the detection and response capabilities we required,” says Bowman.

WHY TREND

The district evaluated four security providers to replace its existing system, but alternative solutions did not seem to be an improvement. “I saw that Trend Micro is in the leadership position on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms. That made me want to investigate them more,” says Bowman.

The fact that Trend Micro solutions with XDR capabilities went beyond identifying existing threats to show his staff why a threat mattered and how to fix it was a deciding factor in choosing Trend Micro.

“It gave us a more robust tool for educating and teaching our staff,” says Bowman.

Additionally, Trend Micro provides organizations with the opportunity to access and trial emerging XDR technologies like Trend Micro Vision One™ that they may be unable to afford.

“The ability to test next-level solutions like Trend Micro Vision One in our environment made a huge difference. Trend Micro is very education friendly,” says Bowman.

SOLUTION

Jordan School District selected Trend Micro Apex One™ as a Service for endpoint protection, bundled with advanced XDR through Trend Micro Vision One, to replace its existing security solution. “The comprehensive solution offered in Trend Micro Apex One as a Service made the decision easier. We looked at piecemeal solutions, and by the time we added them all up— server protection, email protection, endpoint protection—it was astronomically expensive. Trend Micro Apex One had all that built in,” says Bowman.

The district adopted Trend Micro Vision One for its advanced XDR capabilities that collect and correlate deep activity data across multiple vectors.

“The level of threat response capabilities and protection we are getting out of Trend Micro Vision One is impactful,” says Bowman.

RESULTS

Shortly after using Trend Micro’s solutions, Jordan School District located a keylogger in a student’s cloud-based storage drive. Using information from Trend Micro™ Cloud App Security, they determined the student wasn’t a high schooler, but a elementary school student with advanced computer science knowledge.

“We used a Trend Micro alert to show the student that a tool he downloaded—which he thought was legitimate—came with a keylogger built in. It was very eye-opening for him,” says Bowman.

The district also stopped three ransomware attacks in the first month of deploying Trend Micro.

“We have since seen a 40% reduction in spam and a 50% reduction in phishing attempts. Trend Micro improved our security posture, and now I look like a hero,” says Bowman.

Trend Micro’s track record of constantly evolving their platforms to stay ahead of emerging threats gives the district assurance that their compliance requirements will be met. Trend Micro solutions and its platform approach also reduced the district’s latency problem and gives it more control over alerts.

“Trend Micro lets us modify and control security alerts so we can send them only to specific individuals in certain circumstances,” says Bowman.