In response to the growing number of cyber threats against educational institutions in the region, The British University in Dubai (BUiD), the Middle East’s first research based post-graduate university, has significantly strengthened its IT security posture with a campus-wide deployment of ESET Endpoint Security. In doing so, the institution has successfully mitigated the risk of system downtime due to cyber attack while extending industry leading protection across all university own endpoint devices.
“With over 100 staff and 600 students trusting our systems with their sensitive records and information, it is essential that we provide the highest degree of security. While our previous solution was fairly robust, it required a lot of manual intervention for management,” said Joma Cabales, IT Officer at BUiD. “We needed to reduce the strain on our IT resources while increasing our level of protection. The requirement therefore was for a solution which would automate administration tasks, enforce customised security policies and deliver centralised management.”
Cabales and his team first installed ESET Endpoint Security on a trial set of staff computers and on a virtual server. They were instantly impressed by the ease of integration and the solution’s minimal impact on computing resources. This gave BUiD the confidence to roll out the solution across its IT environment, thus extending protection to all university owned endpoint devices.
In addition to comprehensive endpoint protection and remote administration, ESET Endpoint Security delivers flexible and granular access control capabilities allowing BUiD to set policies which dictate and regulate what each user can do on their system.
Highlighting the two biggest benefits of ESET Endpoint Security, Cabales said, “It is very, very light on resources and enables highly simplified management through its intuitive centralised dashboard. It ensures that all systems are up-to-date with the latest software patches and automatically triggers alerts when perceived or known threats are detected.” Perhaps the best testament to the solution’s simplicity and effectiveness is that in the six months since its deployment, Cabales has not registered a single support call with ESET- something that was a fairly regular exercise with the institution’s previous security solution.
BUiD is a 10-year-old higher education institution based in Dubai that specialises in post-graduate courses and was established as a not-for-profit organisation. It receives backing from local and international organisations and all its Masters programmes are accredited by the UAE’s ‘Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research’ (MOHESR).
