Fresno Unified School District (USD) serves more than 74,000 students, from pre-school through grade 12, preparing career-ready graduates through high-quality instruction, services, and resources. The third-largest district in California, they distribute, support, and manage over 100,000 devices across 90 schools.
The Story
Fast-Moving 1-to-1 Program Support
Fresno USD’s sense of urgency to account for all devices grew significantly after rolling out a sweeping 1:1 program, which included more than 75,000 devices for students, teachers, and administrators. When the pandemic hit, the district - like so many across the nation - needed to rapidly equip every student for remote learning. And with an additional 25,000 laptops suddenly in the field, remote device management and data security took on even greater importance.
Security Needs
Comprehensive
Fleet Visibility
Reduced
Device Thefts
CIPA-Compliant
Protection
"We started using Absolute reporting as a sanity check against our physical inventorying. Now, the Absolute report is our inventory. Some schools would say they had run out of devices, but we knew from the Absolute report that they had hundreds of laptops. We would go room to room at the school site and find them – saving us from buying hundreds of devices we didn’t actually need to purchase."
KURT MADDEN
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
FRESNO USD
The Solutions
How They Did It
Addressing Growing Pains
Fresno USD originally turned to Absolute Security to track and trace their Windows mobile devices. With Absolute Secure Endpoint uniquely embedded within the firmware of all their laptops, IT could see where they were at any time and remotely lock them if they fell into the wrong hands. But, when the district-owned fleet of devices increased to more than 20,000, it became challenging for IT to maintain an accurate device inventory.
Activating Absolute’s unique, firmware-embedded connection allowed their IT team to track every laptop’s movement at any time, and remotely lock devices if they fell into the wrong hands.
Visibility and Control of 100,000 Device Fleet
To monitor, manage, remediate risk, and gather precise insights from across their fleet of more than 100,000 devices, Fresno Unified relies on Absolute Secure Endpoint solutions. Using patented Persistence® technology embedded in the firmware of 600+ million devices, Absolute provides a secure, always-on connection between the endpoint and the Absolute Platform. Absolute Secure Endpoint forges an always-on digital tether to every endpoint.
Because the Absolute Persistence technology is factory-embedded in a device’s firmware, it is highly resilient and can survive any attempt to remove or disable it—and it extends this self-healing capability to critical controls such as VPN, anti-virus, and anti-malware applications.
Reducing Loss and Remediating Threats
With the power of the Absolute Secure Endpoint solutions, Fresno USD has saved valuable resources, fueled successful remote learning programs, and greatly reduced risk. Absolute provides their go-to report for inventorying, and the ability to remotely track devices—even when they’re off the school network - has helped with effectively managing their budget.
Of course, ensuring the safety and well-being of their 74,000 students is one of the district’s highest priorities. With Absolute Secure Endpoint providing geolocation details for every device, school officials have helped parents to locate runaway students using location data from school-issued laptops. Lost or stolen devices have also been recovered from various other locations, thanks to the automated message that pops up explaining to the device’s real owner when a machine is rebooted.
The Results
Streamlined Asset Management = More Secure Devices
From device tracking and locating students to making key applications resilient to external factors in the era of remote learning, Fresno USD has seen significant ROI with Absolute Secure Endpoint. The partnership has helped advance major technological initiatives to help teachers be the best they can be during unprecedented times.
For the Fresno USD team, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Manages and secures a 100,000 device fleet across 90 schools
- Provides geolocation details for every device, helping for example parents to locate runaway students
- Enables the IT team to perform configuration and management tasks remotely
- Allows the IT team to save on valuable resources, helping fuel successful remote learning programs
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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