With thousands of users and connected devices, ensuring network reliability, security, and compliance is a significant challenge for universities. Network observability—the ability to gain deep insights into network performance, traffic, and security—enables universities to optimize operations and address key challenges proactively. Here are three ways universities are using Plixer One to do it.
1) Trace Users in NAT Environments
Universities have a unique user base: technologically savvy students who are commonly less mindful about their internet habits than, say, an employee in a corporate office. As such, universities need to be able to investigate things like DMCA claims or unauthorized student SSH traffic.
But many institutions use NAT to manage IP address allocation, which makes it more difficult to determine the specific device or user responsible for an alleged infringement.
In other words: How do you find the relevant device when many devices share an IP?
Typically, you might comb your firewalls’ NAT logs. But this method is extremely time-consuming, especially when you may need to investigate an incident that happened a couple of weeks or even several months ago.
Our customers have found that its far easier and more efficient to leverage Plixer One, which ingests NetFlow, IPFIX, and other flow data. This allows them to quickly search for the event by timestamp and address, identify the protocols and IP addresses involved, then trace to the user. From there, they can determine the appropriate way to respond to the DMCA claim or unauthorized traffic.
2) Demonstrate FERPA and GLBA Compliance
Universities are required to comply with FERPA and GLBA regulations; failure to do so can result in the revocation of federal funding.
Many of the universities who use Plixer One use it not only to help maintain compliance, but also to demonstrate compliance. Here are some ways how:
Detect Data Breaches
Our customers can monitor real-time network communications and detect anomalies that indicate a security breach, data exfiltration, or other incidents. Plixer One’s AI/ML capabilities and contextual insights also provide universities with actionable alerts, rather than large numbers of false positives.
Network analysis with Plixer One is much faster than combing logs, so our customers can demonstrate their ability to respond to security incidents as fast as possible.
Monitor Access to Sensitive Financial Data
By tracking traffic to and from financial databases, our customers can be immediately alerted to unauthorized access attempts, then quickly trace the user and device.
Plixer One’s historical data is relatively lightweight, allowing universities to store years’ worth of data, according to compliance mandates.
Ensure Security Measures Work as Expected
Just as important as implementing security measures is making sure those tools and policies are working as expected. Often, such tools create a black box in the network; can you know that a tool is working when you don’t have visibility into it?
Plixer One enables universities to see when a security measure isn’t working and thus determine how to fix it. But this also enables universities to prove that their measures are effective.
3) Smarter Traffic Insights with AI/ML
Is a network usage spike an indication of a security issue? Is the esports team beginning practice and the spike will end in 20 minutes? Or are students downloading information for their final research papers and usage will be heavier for the next week?
Traditional monitoring tools will trigger an alert in any of these cases, but only one is a cause for concern. Plixer One’s AI/ML features reduce false positives by contextualizing data, providing universities with alerts they can actually take action on.
See Plixer One in Action
If you manage a university network and want to see how Plixer One can help you with these use cases, reach out to schedule a demo with one of our engineers.