Wyoming Seminary Uses McAfee Solutions to Protect High-Risk Users

Founded in 1844 and located near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Wyoming Seminary College Preparatory School is the oldest coeducational independent college preparatory school in the region. The school comprises two campuses. The Lower School, a day school in Forty Fort, serves preschool through grade-eight students. The Upper School, located three miles away in Kingston, serves students from grades nine through 12, some of whom live on campus. A three person IT department, including system administrator Philip Liva, supports just more than a thousand faculty, staff and students at both locations. Liva helped implement a significant systems expansion when he came on board in 2000. Both campuses are now connected by a wide area network (WAN), and all classrooms and dorm rooms are wired for Ethernet. Most faculty and staff members, plus all Upper School students, are provided a Microsoft® Exchange email account. IT supports approximately 750 email accounts altogether. Further, Upper School students are given server space that they can access from anywhere on campus. Faculty and classrooms are equipped with Apple Macintosh computers, while most students, including the approximately 170 who live in the dormitories, own PCs.

Improve email and computer security for high-risk student users
More than any other group of users, the students keep Liva’s team on its toes. “Students’ behavior can be unpredictable,” Liva says. “Students comprise our biggest security challenge. Before we had standardized our anti-virus solution, we had one occasion where our routers were overwhelmed by an outbreak of the Welchia worm, which was caused by unprotected, student-owned PCs in our dorms.“ Before his department decided upon a standard requirement for system-wide anti-virus protection, it relied upon a student being honest or knowledgeable when asked whether his computer had an anti-virus solution installed. Liva discovered that students typically had out-of-date trial versions of software, if any was installed to begin with. When Liva did mandate a particular anti-virus solution, it proved unworthy. “It did not provide a level of protection that we were comfortable with,” he explains. “It was certainly better than none, and it was better than taking the student’s word for it when they claimed to have up-to-date anti-virus software installed. Many times viruses were identified but not neutralized before damage occurred. Cleanup of individual PCs was then time consuming, messy, and often incomplete. Needless to say, we switched away from the solution because it was very expensive and because it just really didn’t deliver the kind of protection we thought it should.”

Then there was the spam problem. When Liva first started, he says spam was uncommon. “An occasional user would complain of a profane message which was unsolicited in their mailbox,” he says. “At that time, I told users that the problem was so minimal that we would not need to address it with an expensive solution. That all changed rather quickly as spam started reaching burdensome levels and soon we were looking for spam solutions.”

"The cost considerations were an important factor in going with McAfee. But, as an added bonus, I found that the products were more effective than prior solutions."

Philip Liva
System Administrator, Wyoming Seminary

Security at the gateway, on the email server and on the desktop
To help combat spam, viruses and other threats that could impact student and other users at Wyoming Seminary, Liva implemented a comprehensive McAfee solution that included McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, McAfee Security for Microsoft Exchange, and McAfee Email and Web Security Appliance. “The cost considerations were an important factor in going with McAfee,” Liva says. “But, as an added bonus, I found that the products were more effective than prior solutions.”

Expectations exceeded
Liva was particularly eager to try out McAfee Email and Web Security Appliance. Still, he expected to send the product back after the 30-day trial. “Usually I’m skeptical,” he says. “When I take on something new and put it through a trial, I expect it to fail.” But the dedicated appliance proved itself in no time. “We quickly became dependent upon it and could not send it back,” Liva says. “It’s very comprehensive. And since the initial installation, it has evolved in major ways and taken on major new features which have improved it even more.” One such improvement occurred after upgrading the e3100 appliance to e3200 specifications, when network bandwidth improved significantly and user complaints diminished.

All in all, Liva has been satisfied with the school’s McAfee solutions. “I wear many IT-related hats in this organization,” he says. “I’m spread very thinly across a very large set of critical responsibilities. To the extent that these McAfee products reduce the burden on my time and do what they are supposed to do, it is saving this school money. We could easily hire another employee to assist with some of my duties, but we decided a long time ago that if we were going to get by with less manpower, we would have to choose the best tools available to assist us in doing our jobs efficiently and effectively.”