Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana is a non-profit social enterprise that partners with the Indiana Charter School Network to support over 3,300 students spread across 11 schools. Together, Goodwill and select schools in the network provide at-risk students with access to laptops to enhance their educational opportunities.
The Story
Protecting Technology Investments for Enrolled Devices
The Indiana Charter School Network was facing a challenge. Without technology in place to maintain consistent IT management procedures, it had no way to keep track of its enrolled devices. They also lacked the ability to ensure that the content accessed through the devices was safe for student consumption.
The association knew it needed a solution that would enable the organization to effectively manage its IT inventory, protect sensitive data, and mitigate security risks when a device is lost or stolen, and track missing devices to recover the cost of its technology investment. In addition, the association needed the ability to remotely assess student usage patterns to prevent access to unauthorized content off the school’s network.
Security Challenges
Theft
Deterrence
Network
Compliance
Inventory
Management
"Often times, humans are the point of failure in the system. We were experiencing a lot of device loss, and Absolute Secure Endpoint has been by far the greatest tool in addressing this challenge."
STANLEY DIXON
APPLICATION ANALYST
GOODWILL INDUSTRIES OF CENTRAL INDIANA
The Solutions
How They Did It
Keeping Devices Safe With Geofencing Capabilities
An answer was found in Absolute Secure Endpoint, which protects the technology investment made by Goodwill Industries for the Indiana Charter School Network. The non-profit organization leverages Absolute Secure Endpoint to restrict student laptops to school grounds.
“The first feature we began using was geofencing,” said Stanley Dixon, Application Analyst at Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana. “When a device leaves the school grounds, an alert is automatically triggered in the system. We can remotely freeze those devices with Absolute.”
Addressing Device Loss With New Security Protocols
Since implementing a formal device security protocol with Absolute, Dixon has seen remarkable improvements. “We were experiencing a lot of device loss, and Absolute Secure Endpoint has been by far the greatest tool in addressing this challenge.”
Alerts Help Manage Student Usage Patterns
Goodwill also relies on alerts generated by Absolute Secure Endpoint to monitor student usage patterns. “Absolute alerts us when a student machine jumps off the approved network or is using a personal hot spot,” said Dixon. “This signals an attempt to circumvent school-issued network controls so we can take corrective measures.”
The Results
Keeping Devices and Students Safe From Theft
Absolute Secure Endpoint has helped the schools and Goodwill decrease theft of devices used by students, maintain FERPA compliance, and better manage hardware inventory.
For Indiana Charter School Industries and Goodwill, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Provides geofencing capabilities, triggering an alert when a device leaves the school grounds
- Helps address the challenge of device loss
- Enables the monitoring of student usage patterns
Absolute Platform FAQ
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.
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