Company
Fife College
Solutions from F-Secure
F-Secure Business Suite
Industry
Education
Country
UK
Fife College provides further and higher education for 24,000 students across six campuses in Fife, Scotland. Tom MacMaster is the lead for digital compliance and cyber security for the College. Tom and the IT team support 3,000 devices and 1,000 staff based across a range of locations.
Their need
Tom picks up the story: “We needed to become Cyber Essentials certified as mandated in the Scottish government’s Public Sector Action Plan for cyber resilience. It was crucial that we had better anti-virus protection than the native Windows Defender we had – to protect both our physical endpoints and our new virtual desktop environment. We wanted a standardized and fully protected experience for students logging in to various machines or for staff accessing our network from work, home or other locations. We also wanted a strong patch management solution to make sure that we fixed vulnerabilities quickly and effectively. From a personal point of view this was really important. I wasn’t confident about the visibility I got before we used F-Secure, as I had to access three or four platforms to get a complete picture of our network’s security.”
"We wanted a standardized and fully protected experience for students logging in to various machines or for staff accessing our network from work, home or other locations."
Our proof of value
“We used a procurement framework to look at a number of endpoint vendors and concluded that F-Secure’s solution met our needs the best.” explains Tom. He continues: “Business Suite is easy to set up and use, and our technical team are big fans of it. We analyse all of our endpoints and get patches out quickly via a single F-Secure platform, which is fantastic. My role at Fife College is about staying on top of the risks and challenges presented by cyber security. I can better perform that role now that F-Secure gives us certainty about what’s happening on our endpoints and network devices”
The solution & business outcomes
Tom MacMaster states that “My role at Fife College is about staying on top of the risks and challenges presented by cyber security. I can better perform that role now that F-Secure gives us certainty about what’s happening on our network.”
Key results after the implementation according to him are:
- A safer environment with anti-virus software on all endpoints, servers and software from one console
- All endpoints are patched and up to date and only run approved applications
- Better visibility of a small number of minor endpoint compromises since the solution was installed. These infections are quarantined and removed – again via the one console.
“Using F-Secure for our endpoint security has been a great experience for Fife College. I have a much better understanding of our environment and fantastic visibility of what’s happening in our network in one place.”
Tom MacMaster, Digital Governance Manager, Fife College