Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) serves more than 78,000 students in 89 facilities, including 15 high schools, 15 middle schools, 57 elementary schools, and three special purpose schools. Each year, approximately 2,500 new students enroll in their schools, and up to three new school facilities are opened to accommodate the rapid growth.
The Story
The Search For A Personalized Learning Solution
LCPS wanted to start a new personalized learning program. To increase productivity for both teachers and students, they had to replace desktops with tens of thousands of laptops. Before this initiative could move forward, the budget would have to be approved by the board. The school district needed a solution that would help them:
- Prevent device theft and secure sensitive data
- Demonstrate device utilization rates – whether on or off the school network
- Drive consensus that teachers require laptops to provide better digital learning experiences
- Protect their investment in technology and ensure continued funding
Security Needs
Increased
Productivity
Secured
Technology
Investment
Peace of
Mind
"We were able to provide the board with quantitative information about device utilization that drives consensus so the budget could be approved. Also, peace of mind with security, privacy, and theft recovery."
DR. RICH CONTARESI
CIO
LOUDON COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS
The Solutions
How They Did It
Simplifying Device Management
By working closely with Absolute Security and Dell, LCPS now gets their laptop images to include Absolute Secure Endpoint. Firmware-embedded Absolute Persistence® technology allows LCPS to remotely manage all devices throughout the district and freeze or wipe a device whenever necessary.
Robust Reporting Helps Build The Case for a Personalized Learning Program
The implementation of Absolute Secure Endpoint was a turning point for LCPS. The data and device protection that Absolute Secure Endpoint provides was what the school district required to get funding for the personalized learning program. LCPS could provide the board with quantitative information on device utilization rates right away, proving that laptops were a necessary learning tool for both teachers and students. Consequently, technology refreshes have been secured for four additional years.
Keeping Security and Privacy Top of Mind
With Absolute Secure Endpoint, the security department at LCPS now receives automated alerts on anomalies, allowing them to focus on reviewing potential security issues. If a device is stolen, it can be tracked and recovered. Privacy and security are also ensured through the ability to remotely manage devices and take action when necessary—regardless of user or device location.
The Results
Increasing Value and Productivity while Minimizing Security Risks
The school system now has peace of mind about endpoint security, device theft recovery, and data privacy, and they have minimized their risk and increased the value and utility of their devices.
For LCPS, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Helps LCPS provide the board with quantitative information on device utilization rates right away to prove laptops were necessary tools for both teachers and students
- Provides the security department at LCPS with automated alerts on anomalies
- Allows the LCPS team to track and recover stolen devices
- Enables LCPS to remotely manage all devices throughout the district and freeze or wipe a device if necessary
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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