November 2007 — News
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Laptop Security: Covering the Bases
Texas school district issues laptops to students, but not before making sure they're equipped with filtering, firewall, and virus protection
Students at two Laredo Independent School District middle schools became the lucky recipients of 3,000 laptops last year, thanks to a PIP grant that funded the purchase of the Dell computers. Used during the school day, the laptops are also toted home at night, allowing students to use them for both educational study and leisure. It's the latter that led the school district to take one additional step before handing out the machines: equip them with filtering, antivirus and firewall protection that would keep both computer and user secure in the unpredictable online world.
"Our biggest dilemma was figuring out how to provide content-filtering at home," said Hilario Solis, software support specialist for the Texas school district, which comprises 26 schools and employs 20 computer technicians, five of whom are dedicated to working on the laptops. With 5,000 total Dell Inspiron 1150s and Dell Latitude 620s, the district reviewed its options and decided on Sunnyvale, CA-based Fortinet's security applications to provide content filtering, firewall and antivirus protection.
The district is using FortiClient Mobile, a unified security agent designed for personal computers, including personal firewall, antivirus, antispyware, antispam and Web content filtering. FortiClient's protection agent is powered by FortiGuard security, and monitored through FortiManager, a centralized tracking and reporting system.
The district licensed the software for four years at a cost of approximately $23 per unit, according to Solis. Getting the system up and running was fairly straightforward and took just a few hours, said Solis, whose team also had to configure the system in a way that allowed students to access it while off campus. "By Day 2 we were up and running," said Solis, "with students receiving antivirus updates and content filtering on a regular basis."
Within a few months, the district's technology team was sending out configurations in the form of templates, defining what it deemed to be "unacceptable" content, based on the school's acceptable-use policy. Since installing the security system on the laptops, Solis said, the district has seen a marked decrease in the number of computer viruses infiltrating the laptops and the level of unacceptable content being accessed on the machines.
Laredo Independent School District's technicians are also less taxed and can focus their efforts on hardware issues, rather than grappling with software configuration problems brought on by the downloading of video games via the Internet, for example. "When students would download games (which the district considers unacceptable content) it would mess up the operating system and configurations," said Solis. "Our technicians would have to reload the machines with the operating system and troubleshoot back and forth to get the problem solved."
