As an educational institution, our needs are no different to a corporation's needs. We however do not have the same budget availability, so we need to be able to do more with far fewer resources
Michael Allen, Technology Director
The Licking R-VIII School District, a K12 educational institution in Missouri, urgently required a reliable defensive solution to counteract their exposure to vast amounts of malware-serving websites being accessed primarily by the student body and mitigate against infected USB sticks being brought into the environment by staff and students.
Our 2-man IT administration team is responsible for managing circa 500 machines, with another 200 being added over the next 12 months.
Without the budget available to the average corporate entity of similar size our limited support staff needed to find a method of reducing the amount of time consumed by endpoint AV management. Over and above the necessity of a product capable of real-time alerting and reactive management, proactive protection against malware was essential due to the high exposure to viruses, Trojans and spyware the school experiences as a result of the student users.
Our previous defenses comprised of a standalone, unmanaged AV solution which allowed a very high number of infections through causing many hours per week cleaning and remediating infections from our network.
Having been impressed with other Comodo products as home users, we engaged with Comodo to learn of any corporate AV products they might have offering a centralized management capability to reduce the administrative overhead of the old product and reduce the amount of infections.
We were introduced to Advanced Endpoint Protection and were amazed by the power and control it had over its managed workstations and servers and how easy it was to use. We thus added ESM to the list of products that would go forward into our test and trial environment.
Having tested and trialed Comodo's offering against the other chosen products, we decided that we would proceed with the production deployment of Advanced Endpoint Protection.
Upon contacting our account manager, we were pleasantly surprised to be offered very generous educational discounts but even more surprised to be offered the services of Comodo's business and enterprise support team to assist us with the rollout of ESM and ensure that deployment and configuration ‘best practice' was followed. This unexpected benefit served to drastically reduce our learning curve as we could engage in Q & A sessions with the implementation team to understand how and why certain procedures were put in place.
The implementation team also showed us how we could use ESM as a system management tool to monitor our computer's and server's resource consumption and alert should consumption thresholds be exceeded, how to use ESM as a remote screen-sharing tool to assist our users without having to leave our desks and how we could accurately track all the computing hardware and software in our environment through ESM's reporting functionality.
Over and above the discount and having Comodo's team set up our environment for us, we have seen our network being completely cleaned up by Comodo's software finding and eliminating all the infections that were completely invisible to previous product. Not only is our network clean, but not one of our systems has been infected since we implemented our new product nearly 8 months ago.
Because Comodo Advanced Endpoint Protection is giving us back so much of our time, is making more student machines available due to not having to take them off the network for decontamination and is assisting the faculty to be more productive due to increased availability of their computers I can honestly say that we love this product.
Michael Allen
Technology Director, Licking R-VIII School District
125 Main Street
Licking, MO 65542