‘Always on’ website protection gives Cardinal Newman College superior protection

The challenge

Cardinal Newman College aims to create a safe environment for students, but with cyber attacks on colleges and universities becoming more frequent and sophisticated, the question had to be asked: What more could the college do to safeguard its essential CEDAR student and parent portal?

The solution

Anthony Dickinson, Cardinal Newman’s head of network services says:

"CEDAR is a key system in the day-to-day running of the college and is the go-to resource for students, teachers and parents for information on timetabling and progress."

Protecting CEDAR was a clear priority so, having completed a full review of the college’s cyber security posture, Anthony began to search for a website management service to deliver responsive, effective cyber security protection round the clock. And because the college is a long-standing customer of ours, he didn’t have far to look. Anthony explains:

“Jisc’s solution is different. We looked at commercially developed ones and they required us to sort out the fine-tuning for ourselves. We don’t have the time or dedicated specialist expertise for that.

"Jisc’s WAF service manages everything. And because the organisation designs services around the education sector we felt confident when it came to procurement.”

Benefits

Simplicity

When a customer opts for our WAF service we work with them to scope out their requirements and tailor a solution. Then, they simply give us the domain names and IP addresses of the assets that need protection. We re-route all the traffic through our systems and scrub bad traffic.

As a customer with two 1Gb connections to the Janet Network, Cardinal Newman experiences latency of only milliseconds as a result of the re-routing – imperceptible to the website’s users.

Once the WAF service is implemented our experts finesse it using adaptive machine learning tools. Tuning sessions happen three or four times a day to learn what usual traffic looks like for the application. In this way, we make sure nothing is being blocked unnecessarily. Anthony says:

“The college doesn’t have to do anything else. The set-up, fine-tuning and ongoing management are all taken care of quickly from day one, and at all happens seamlessly. We have much more confidence that we’re as secure as we can be, from both known and emerging threats and so we’ve had no hesitation in renewing the initial service contract.”

Enterprise-grade protection

Our WAF service provides complete protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, as well as current and evolving threats including credential stuffing, zero-day attacks, SQL injection, cross-site scripting and more.

Tailored protection at a fixed price

We work with customers to find a cost effective, fixed price solution tailored to their technical and operational environment and then provide guidance with on-boarding. For Cardinal Newman College, our WAF service includes both the college’s CEDAR application and a CEDAR portal operated by the nearby Lancaster University School of Mathematics, which Cardinal Newman College manages on the university’s behalf.

“We only ever receive first-class service from Jisc.”
Anthony Dickinson, head of network service, Cardinal Newman College

Round-the-clock, responsive service

Unlike many commercially developed services, Jisc provides a single point of contact to access an instant out-of-hours response for incident reporting and service requests.