ACADEMIA

Top Layer Networks, the global leader for high performance intrusion prevention solutions, today announced that Wake Technical Community College, one of the largest colleges in the state of North Carolina, deployed Top Layer's Attack Mitigator IPS 5500. Wake Technical Community College is using the IPS 5500 to protect its network resources and more than 3,000 campus desktops from an array of cyber threats ranging from rogue servers and worms to denial-of-service attacks and exploits of software and systems vulnerabilities. Wake Technical Community College is one of the largest colleges in North Carolina, spanning six campuses and serving more than 52,000 students. In addition to students enrolled in curriculum courses and continuing education courses, Wake Technical Community College employs more than 900 faculty and staff. Wake Technical Community College is funded by a National Science Foundation Grant for a partnership with the North Carolina Supercomputing Center to establish a Center of Excellence for High-Performance Computing Technology. This center demands network availability and high reliability for the college to conduct video conferences and associated collaborative activities. "With six campuses and more than 52,000 students, Wake Technical Community College is one of the largest colleges in North Carolina - broad network availability and reliability are key to the success of our educational institution," said Dr. Darryl McGraw, CIO of Wake Technical Community College. "Top Layer's Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 helped us identify and eliminate a number of rogue servers that had been set up on the network and impacted performance, saving us significant time and consulting fees. In addition, the IPS 5500 protects the college from a variety of other cyber threats, returning our network to optimal performance levels and again saving substantial bandwidth costs." Top Layer's IPS 5500 helps Wake Technical Community College provide high-performance Internet and network availability by ridding the network of costly intruders and cyber threats. In addition to helping Wake Technical Community College protect its resources from inbound threats, the IPS 5500 enables the college to protect against and identify sources of internally-launched attacks. The implementation of Top Layer's IPS 5500 represents a key component of the college's network improvement initiative, aimed at providing students, faculty and staff with greater network availability and performance. "Wake Technical Community College sought to fortify its network defenses and turned to our team to help them understand their options," said Ike Bun n, president of Enterprise Network Services, Inc., a Top Layer reseller. "Top Layer's Attack Mitigator IPS 5500 had the proven protection mechanisms and performance that made it the clear choice to provide Wake Tech the highest levels of protection from today's sophisticated attacks." Peter Rendall, president and CEO of Top Layer, added, "Educational institutions such as Wake Technical Community College pose a unique security challenge in that they offer an open network readily accessible by students, faculty and staff, but requires a high level of protection. Inline network intrusion prevention solutions that can mitigate both inbound and outbound attacks are topping the wish lists of those organizations that offer public and semi-private networks, like those found in education."