Spokane Public Schools is one of the top five largest school districts in Washington State, with nearly 28,000 students, serving the city of Spokane. The district oversees and administers seven high schools, six middle schools, and 34 elementary schools.
The Story
Address Device Management Challenges Underlined by Remote Learning
Before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, all the Windows devices the school deployed stayed on school grounds. When the pandemic hit, those devices were required to go home overnight. This presented a couple of challenges with managing their device inventory while also ensuring the IT team had complete visibility across their device fleet, no matter where students were.
Security Needs
Hardware Inventory
Reporting
Track and Locate
Devices
Saved Time
and Money
"Knowing that Absolute is built into the BIOS is the biggest selling point. We would have something that was not going to fail; it did not make sense to spend money on a solution that could get reimaged or wiped. If I am going to spend the money, it needs to be as foolproof as possible, which gave us the confidence to use Absolute."
Greg Trepus
Supervisor, IT Support Center
Spokane Public Schools
The Solutions
How They Did It
Boost Visibility into Hardware Inventory Throughout the Entire District
Absolute Secure Endpoint stood out as an ideal solution to help Spokane Public Schools manage its device inventory. Through the district’s inventory system, as well as features from Absolute, Spokane Public Schools can correctly log and identify login data usage and appropriately track how devices are being used across the district. This gave the IT team a robust understanding of where the device is, how many devices the school needs, or if a school is short on devices. In addition, it provided information on whether devices were assigned to students who transferred out of the district. This ensures the inventory is accurate, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when distanced learning was enforced.
Guarantee Devices Remain Safeguarded, No Matter Where They Are
Not only was Absolute Secure Endpoint key in enhancing the district’s inventory management system, but it also provided the capability to track and locate missing devices. Once a device is reported lost or stolen, the Spokane Public School IT team can utilize Absolute to implement a quick process in locking the device and displaying a message with instructions on how to get the device returned. This resulted in several devices being returned to the district that would have otherwise gone undetected, also safeguarding the device and data. This also provided the ability to improve the device collection process before summer break; with Absolute’s End User Messaging feature, Spokane Public Schools can remind students to return their devices.
Free Up Resources and Time with Automated Reports
Another key benefit Absolute Secure Endpoint provided the school district was the ability to create succinct reports. Before Absolute was deployed, a member of Spokane Public School’s IT team would need to go out and conduct a full inventory of each site and input the data to assess the device allocation of each school. Now with Absolute Secure Endpoint’s reporting, Spokane Public School can completely remove the manual, onsite device inventory process, freeing up time and resources for their IT team. In addition, these reports also provided the insight needed to make key business decisions on how devices should be rolled out in each school based on usage.
The Results
Enhanced Device Visibility + Control = Saved Time and Money
Spokane Public Schools have peace of mind that they now have complete visibility and control over their entire device fleet. Absolute Secure Endpoint allows the district to retain command of all its endpoints, no matter where students are learning.
For the Spokane Public School District, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Reports on hardware inventory by leveraging prebuilt and custom reports
- Tracks and measures device usage, including login data, to retain command of all its endpoints
- Provides visibility of all enrolled devices, on or off the corporate network
- Remotely freezes at-risk devices and notifies users with custom messages
- Saves the IT team time and money with reports on various data points, eliminating many manual processes
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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Mitigating Zero-Day Threats in a Complex Cybersecurity LandscapeLive Webinar - Sept 17, 2024 | 9AM PT
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Leveraging AI to Protect Against Modern Cybersecurity ThreatsLive Webinar - Oct 1, 2024 | 9AM PT
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