University of Manchester Chooses StealthWatch to Improve Network Management

  • Apr 28, 2009

Lancope, Inc., the provider of the StealthWatch® System, today announced that The University of Manchester has chosen the StealthWatch to monitor network behavior, detect network incidents and identify affected machines and users. NetFlow-based StealthWatch reduces total network and security management costs for The University of Manchester.

As Britain's largest single-site university, The University of Manchester has 35,000 students and more than 11,000 staff. The network includes 15,000 campus PCs, plus 11,000 more computers in residence halls. Two data centers house highly available systems to provide business applications, e-mail, Web access, storage and more. The University of Manchester's Directorate of IT Services is responsible for centralized IT services and support, as well as local services for faculty teams.

"We have a large, complex network with a lot of unmanaged desktop machines," said Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator for The University of Manchester. "We knew viruses, bots and Trojans were hitting the network and that a significant amount of illegal file sharing was occurring, but we had no tools to detect unwanted or anomalous behavior. Nor did we have any tools that could analyze the type of traffic on our network."

After spending weeks investigating and resolving an incident involving suspiciously high traffic levels to and from certain network services, The University of Manchester IT staff realized it needed a solution for improved network visibility. First they investigated intrusion prevention systems (IPS), but soon realized that IPS technology could not provide a holistic view of the campus network without a huge expense.

"Khipu Networks, our Lancope reseller, suggested network behavior analysis technology and arranged a trial of StealthWatch," said Arnold. "We found StealthWatch so useful right away; it delivered exactly what we wanted, so we decided to deploy it on our network."

The University of Manchester uses the StealthWatch Xe for NetFlow collector appliance to gather high-speed traffic information from each of the University's six core routers for analysis by the StealthWatch Management Console. The University of Manchester also relies on the StealthWatch IDentity appliance to link individual users with specific network events for increased user accountability and faster, more immediate insight into unexpected network and security events.

With detailed visibility insight into network traffic patterns, link utilization and overall network performance, StealthWatch dramatically accelerates network and security troubleshooting.

Prior to StealthWatch, investigating network events was a cumbersome, time-consuming process. "Individual system administrators had to manually gather information from their system and then come together to correlate behaviors in an attempt to pinpoint the source of the problem," said Arnold. "Now we simply access the StealthWatch Management Console for a consolidated view of network traffic and behavior. The system is incredibly flexible and tunable as well."

Using StealthWatch, The University of Manchester IT staff has spotted trouble on the network before it was noticed anywhere else. And, it has saved valuable time in identifying specific users who have accessed a particular system.

According to Arnold, "StealthWatch will improve our customer service and keep us more proactive when it comes to addressing network behavior and security incidents."

"Khipu Networks partners with Lancope because we see StealthWatch as a 'no-brainer' solution for any organization seeking holistic network visibility and performance management without the cost and complexity of deploying in-line technologies. Furthermore, StealthWatch easily scales to accommodate any network throughput, which for Universities sector often means Gigabit and more," said Vil Dhutia, commercial consultant for Khipu Networks. "The University of Manchester relies on StealthWatch daily, highlighting the need among all Universities for non-intrusive network behavior analysis."

"Universities maintain large, complex networks that require continuous visibility and control, but often lack the resources necessary for optimal network performance and security demands," said Harland LaVigne, president and CEO of Lancope. "We designed the StealthWatch System to help institutions, like The University of Manchester, optimize security, network and virtual operations while maximizing limited resources. The University of Manchester joins more than 60 other academic institutions across 25 countries in recognizing StealthWatch network behavior analysis as an integral part of a complete security and network management strategy."

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