Member Article

Dixon City Academy selects a Barracuda SSL VPN

Dixon City Academy selects a Barracuda SSL VPN to defend against malicious hackers and ensure secure remote access

As one of an ever-increasing number of City Technology Academies in England, Dixon City Academy in Bradford is a high performing school specialising in performing arts, vocational careers and design technology. Regularly rated among the top ten national state schools for its students’ achievements, its success is built on a contemporary hi-tech learning environment.

These days most student research and course work is conducted via a central college server with 24x7 availability. This is also the case for teaching staff who use remote access to control resources and for marking purposes. With up to 1,400 pupils and 120 members of staff using a mixture of PC, Android and Mac devices, secure remote access is now an essential part of education IT Systems.

Looking to keep up with the IT demands of a successful City Technology college Dixon City Academy wanted to improve its remote access capability and move to a more secure, scalable solution which offered increased management granularity, ease-of-use and cost-efficiency. In the face of increasing security threats and growing student numbers, Victor Freeburn, network manager at Dixon City Academy decided to research what secure access solutions were available.

“Security in education is a never ending battle as there are always mischievous students and malevolent members of society wanting to try out their hacking skills,” said Freeburn. “However, as well as security we have other remote access issues as student and teacher numbers fluctuate on a regular basis which often leaves us with licensing problems. I needed to regain control of my IT costs.”

In common with many other organisations, and because licensing charges are often connected to user numbers, Dixon City Academy was often out of pocket paying for licenses that were not being used. It also found that some solutions were extremely complicated in their management and configuration, which caused a significant overhead to the IT department. Freeburn hoped his research would solve these problems.

Plug-and-play set-up

After assessing the best secure access solutions available on the market, Freeburn selected Barracuda Networks and ran a trial of the Barracuda SSL VPN, Model 380. “The Barracuda SSL VPN was selected for a number of reasons and the speed at which we could deploy it was quite high on the list as it minimises network downtime,” he said. “During the trial we found it was easy-to-use, and its management console was more efficient and simpler in its layout than competitor products. Users need only a web browser to connect to the school remotely, which meant that setting up user accounts was very straight forward.”

When the three-month trial came to an end, Freeburn decided to continue with the Barracuda SSL VPN solution.

“We were delighted with the Barracuda SSL VPN. Over the months it has proved to be a highly stable device, and as an enterprise-class solution, delivers high throughput speeds, smoother connections and both users and IT administrators find it easy to use.”

Freeburn also discovered another useful benefit. Dixon City Academy has other Barracuda products in the shape of Backup devices. The GUI logic for the SSL VPN management is exactly the same as the Backup devices, meaning the IT department knew quickly how to manage the SSL VPN without much additional training.

Future-proofing – an important factor

Now established, the Barracuda Networks’ solution has had the desired impact on Freeburn’s IT costs. “As the Barracuda SSL VPN is clientless it means the IT management team do not have to ‘push’ client licenses out to remote machines or require an end-user to try to configure the connection back to the appliance/gateway,” he said. “This has delivered a considerable cost/time benefit and the savings are not limited to licensing and IT personnel time. As part of its policy, Barracuda Networks offers a hardware refresh every four years as part of its subscription agreement. Subscribers have new hardware supplied free of charge, removing the need to pay for the cost of a new appliance ever again. This unique Barracuda policy decreases the IT overheads for the Academy dramatically.”

Reflecting on the future of Dixon City’s IT systems, Freeburn concluded, “Dixon City Academy will continue to grow and acquire additional campuses and students. Because of the security and scalability of Barracuda Networks’ SSL VPN it has the ability to grow with the Academy’s needs and at no additional cost. When coupled with the free hardware refresh and best-in-class performance it is a complete package which no other IT security vendor had been able to match.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Barracuda Networks .