| Education |
- How does your institution control peer-to-peer networks and other bandwidth-hog applications?
- What measures have you taken to prevent malicious code on everyday sites from risking sensitive information or crashing the network?
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Schools and universities worldwide are aware of the challenges of providing internet access to students and faculty. On one hand, the internet provides a wealth of unique resources that enhance the learning experience. On the other, misuse creates legal liabilities and drains resources. Institutions need the ability to transparently monitor and manage email and web access to mitigate these risks. |
| The Risks of Malicious Code: Data Loss and Down time |
| Nearly half of malicious code is embedded on websites that students and faculty access regularly, such as search engines. Further, innocent users are often tricked into visiting such sites. Malware risks data loss; important institution records and private information are destroyed. Viruses lead to system crashes, creating down time that is a headache for institutions. |
| Granular Control of Bandwidth to Preserve Network Performance |
| Another concern for schools and universities is bandwidth. Streaming music, videos and chats sap bandwidth and hinder the speed and performance of a network. This cuts everybody’s productivity and requires institutions to invest even more resources in bandwidth. At the same time, it’s impractical to block all access to streaming media. For example, in universities such as Berkeley and MIT, students stream lectures in video or audio formats. These lectures are an important educational tool that should be allowed. |
| Furthermore, peer-to-peer networks are common on schools and campuses. They are usually used to download copyrighted music and videos. Not only do they consume essential bandwidth, but it can also become a legal liability. Thus, institutions should be able to manage bandwidth with granular controls based on application, user, bandwidth and more. What specific applications to allow or block? What policies will apply to faculty and students? How much bandwidth to allocate to different types of applications? |
| Regulatory Compliance for Public Institutions |
Finally, the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires public institutions to prevent access to offensive content on the Internet to minors. Educational institutions should have a filtering policy to comply and to avoid lawsuits by concerned parents, which waste time and money and hurt an institution’s reputation.
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Educational institutions use Zscaler to minimize resource mis-use and legal liability, while providing Internet access to facility and students to facilitate a rich learning environment.
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| To learn more about how Zscaler can help educational institutions, please click here. |
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