Toronto District Installs VPN Appliance To Speed Remote Report Card Application Access

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/11/08

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The Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) has deployed a remote access program from Juniper Networks to manage teacher and staff access to a Web-based report card system from remote locations. The Juniper Networks SA 6000 SSL VPN 6000 appliance, designed for large and multinational enterprises, features a secure socket layer (SSL) acceleration chipset to speed CPU-intensive encrypt/decrypt processes.

Until recently, teachers accessed report cards at the district through an application running on an internal server. With a finite number of school-based PCs, 5,500 teachers and 400 school administrators accessing the system, the school board determined it needed to build a Web-based report card application that would provide teachers with secure remote access and the freedom to fill out report cards for more than 90,000 students at their convenience. Now, teachers can log in through a browser and enter a user name and password to gain access to the report card application.

"We wanted to provide teachers and administrative staff the ability to securely access.... electronic services anytime, anywhere" said Keith Chung, senior manager of IT security, network infrastructure and services, TCDSB. "Juniper's solutions also have the capability to scan the security profile of home-based machines for up-to-date Windows patches, anti-virus signatures and other security software, which further enables our systems administrators to ensure the security of information assets."

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About the author: Dian Schaffhauser is a writer who covers technology and business for a number of publications. Contact her at [email protected].

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