Network administrators in higher education have one of the most challenging jobs around. Their networks need to scale to near Internet Service Provider-class levels with tens (or in some cases hundreds) of Gigs of bandwidth, while handling an unparalleled number and diversity of users, connected devices, and applications. The network ‘dial-tone’ is taken for granted with instant access, high availability and low latency considered table stakes.
The education sector prides itself on creating one of most open environments on the planet for free communication and active collaboration. This extends to how the network gets used by its students, faculty, staff and in some cases alumni. For example, history shows that educational institutions have been ‘ground zero’ for the adoption of some of the latest, cutting-edge mobile and web apps, like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat.
Network abuse can also run rampant. Bandwidth-hungry file sharing, gaming and media streaming can quickly overwhelm the network. The days of watching television have been replaced by high-definition, on-demand Netflix streams or multi-player gaming served up from the Playstation or Xbox networked platforms. In some cases, the quest for popular (and free) audio and video files puts the institution in legal exposure like in the case of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) or Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) policing copyright infringement on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.
Although often operating in a non-profit capacity, the same regulatory and compliance obligations apply to educational institutions as ‘for-profit’ businesses. In the US for example, many institutions are required to comply with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). And like any traditional business, these institutions don’t have unlimited funds. They need to manage information technology (IT) spend carefully, make careful considerations around operating costs and total cost of ownership, as well as closely align initiatives with critical business objectives and return on investment goals.
To effectively deploy and manage these challenging higher education networks, following are some tips and tricks that Symantec has identified by working with global customers over the years:
Start with visibility. Whether planning for capacity upgrades, troubleshooting app performance, fact-checking efficacy of security investments, or deploying an early-warning system for suspicious traffic, data breaches or compliance violations, it all starts with visibility. Having technology elements in place to provide this visibility – across all ports, protocols, applications – including for the growing volumes of encrypted traffic and web apps/URLs is critical. This visibility needs to translate into simple to digest reports, plus detailed flow-level records of network events.
Layer on context. Identifying applications based on ports and protocols is just part of the story. Greater context on the nature of the application traffic is imperative. This might come down to differentiating the e-learning or business-critical traffic from recreational, or defining traffic by categories like malicious or suspicious, social networking or video rich media, or even insights into traffic about hate speech or weapons and violence can be valuable for decision-making and better understanding user behavior.
Personalize the experience. Especially in higher education with the diversity of the user population, it’s important to align the network with the specific users’ needs, such as students versus faculty. This includes fairly allocating bandwidth across the population or aligning available bandwidth to meet application-specific service level agreements (SLAs) to address user satisfaction, performance and ultimately productivity. For example, open or guest WiFi environments in higher education can be particularly challenging when it comes to sharing bandwidth and guarding against abuse. Personalizing the use of the network ultimately translates into helping these institutions meet their critical business objectives and getting the most out of their IT investments.
Remember bandwidth is never free. Often customers think all network problems can be solved by just adding more bandwidth. And in some regions with bandwidth nearly free or heavily subsidized by government programs, bandwidth spend can be a negligible expense. However, bandwidth is not free and deploying the network infrastructure from switches, routers and load-balancers to handle tens of Gigs can be very costly, never mind the cost of the personnel, ongoing management and administration, and ultimately trade-offs for how available bandwidth could be used more efficiently. Keeping this in mind and making smart decisions in how the cost of bandwidth and backhaul is calculated is imperative.
Always consider security posture. Lastly and coming back to the first point about visibility, intelligence on the network traffic mix, what is consuming bandwidth, how bandwidth is being used (or abused), and learning about the traffic patterns in detail not only helps on the network planning side, but also when it comes to an institution's security posture. The right solutions for visibility and control help educational instituations get their arms around encrypted traffic, suspicious or malicious activity, potential data exfiltration and other risk points that can ultimately protect the user population but also de-risk the institution and its brand and assets in the long run.
As demonstrated in hundreds of customer deployments, Symantec solutions for network optimization can aid administrators tremendously as they deploy and manage their networks. Symantec works with these higher educational institutions around the world providing its best-of-breed products – including MACH and PacketShaper – plus related services and consulting to ensure deployments are successful. Plus, many of the solutions from Symantec are available via e-Rate to ease the purchasing process and access to funding.
The Symantec MACH5 solution provides proven technology for optimizing the delivery of content, especially large files and video, using techniques like stream-splitting and caching to boost download speeds while saving on bandwidth. Bandwidth savings alone with MACH5 can exceed 50% for general web traffic or as much as 90% with targeted caching and video streaming. Educational institutions have found that these optimization technologies can help with large file updates from Apple or Microsoft, or when traffic spikes due to popular web events like the World Cup or March Madness. Plus, MACH5 can easily be upgraded via software licensing to enable advanced security features for deep content inspection, malware analysis and security protection that are a requirement when going direct-to-net.
Able to scale to handle 10 Gigs of traffic in a small, two rack unit appliance, the Symantec PacketShaper solution provides all ports, protocols and application visibility for valuable reporting and intelligence on network traffic, as well as rich user-aware policy controls for shaping, throttling, alerting or even blocking select traffic. For example, it’s common to see educational institutions using PacketShaper to prioritize Office365 or other critical e-learning applications, while in other cases throttling P2P file sharing. In addition, the rich flow-aware data collected with PacketShaper can be exported and leverage by other infrastructure elements such as Splunk to not only help with network planning but also improve an institution’s overall security posture.
Now is the time to reach out to Symantec and learn more about our network optimization solutions, as well as how we have helped other higher education customers like you. To learn more about Symantec, visit https://www.symantec.com.