OVERVIEW

As a campus of Memorial University of Newfoundland, the Fisheries and Marine Institute is North America’s most comprehensive institute dedicated to education, training, research, and industrial support for the oceans industries. Its capability combines the best of world-class facilities, strong education and training programs, and highly qualified and dedicated people. Located in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador,, the Marine Institute has six other locations throughout the province, seven applied research centres, and works with its academic and industry partners across Canada and around the world in various oceans sectors.

The Institute’s IT department supports about 400 employees, approximately 1,000 full-time students, and more than 8,000 students registrations in short-course training programs.

CHALLENGES

At a research university, data is the most valuable asset and must be carefully protected. In 2011, when the Marine Institute virtualized its physical servers, the Institute’s IT team realized they needed to improve their security protection as well. “We were using another product with our physical servers, but we knew that wouldn’t work in a virtual server infrastructure environment,” said Trevor Pike, manager of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Department at the Marine Institute. “We perform research activities involving mapping the ocean floor around Newfoundland, and other endeavors that are time consuming, dangerous, and expensive. You only want to do it once. Having to replace that data would be catastrophic.”

Pike needed to maintain an open environment where researchers could share data while also protecting that data. At the same time, he needed to ensure that the institute had the best possible endpoint protection given the number of faculty and students it serves.

WHY TREND

In addition to improving overall data protection, Pike needed protection for the institute’s new network-attached storage (NAS). This solution was pattern-based, required much of the available computer resources and yet it didn’t provide a sufficient protection from all malware. Until 2014, all data were residing on the local mainframes. It was then decided to move all data to two external datacenters (in an active-active configuration) which host all 250 virtual servers.

As RJV-ONVA is a public institution, a cost/benefit analysis is required if the value of a procurement exceeds a certain threshold. Emmanuel Lekeu: “We have investigated all available vendors’ offering, more specifically how their solutions met the requirements that matter most to us, such as their use of available computer resources and their licensing model. Trend Micro emerged as the winner. Their capacity to integrate with VMware was an important bonus, which our previous provider failed to offer. Additionally, Trend Micro provides an all-in-one solution, which is a huge advantage for us. Last but not least: Trend Micro was among the first to use a licensing model per user instead of per device.”.

SOLUTION

In 2014, Pike and his team implemented Trend Micro™ Deep Security™ solution for their virtual server infrastructure to protect against malware and threats.  “There wasn’t anything else on the market that offered the same protection at the hypervisor level,” said Pike. “Any security pro out there will tell you: Trend Micro Deep Security is the Cadillac of systems for a virtual environment.”

By 2017, the institute was moving to the cloud and was using another vendor’s product for endpoint protection. But when they began seeing a rise in endpoint incidents, Pike and his team decided it was time to evolve. Pike implemented Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Suite for endpoint protection. Today, Smart Protection Suite is on every endpoint and runs on the institute’s web proxy gateway for NAS file shares and on the institute’s email servers. “The larger university runs the big ERP applications,” said Pike. “We run a number of smaller apps, so data and email are core. We have to protect those resources.”

RESULTS

Pike and his team review security metrics daily and feel confident in the results they are seeing. “I’m always impressed with the level of reporting we get and the fact that there are very few incidents in those reports. And if there are any incidents, they are remediated automatically,” he said. “Trend Micro Deep Security has achieved our security objectives.”

Trend Micro Smart Protection Complete protects the institute across a broad range of threats. The suite integrates with enterprise applications and cloud applications to minimize the impact on IT and administrators. Smart Protection Complete also evolves to find new threats by sharing threat intelligence among security layers, and its centralized visibility across endpoints, email, web, and hosted security services reduces management time. “Almost immediately after implementing it, we saw a drastic reduction in what was hitting the firewall,” said Pike. “That improves performance across our entire IT environment.”

WHAT'S NEXT

Looking to the future, Pike plans to implement a security education program for institute staff, researchers, and students to help reiterate and promote safe computing practices. He also plans to work with Trend Micro to strengthen the Institute’s network and ensure optimal security protection.