Industry
Education, K-12
Employees
7,184
Region
United States, North America
Students
55,800
IT environment
Microsoft, Apple, Google, VMware
TrendAI Vision One™ Solutions:
- Reduced spam by 40% and phishing attempts by 50%
- Stopped three ransomware attacks in the first month
- Improved data security and compliance while keeping costs in check
THE CHALLENGE
Staying ahead of AI-powered threats without impacting education
Valuable student data makes school districts a lucrative target for cybercriminals. But for districts that are publicly funded, protecting against threats can be a real challenge, particularly those driven by AI.
As the fourth largest school district in Utah, serving nearly 56,000 students across 68 schools, Jordan School District needed to update its security solutions to protect student data and meet compliance requirements under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The district also added several new technologies over the years, requiring a greater emphasis on data security.
“We have to walk a fine line. We must be secure without taking away from our core mission of educating kids,” says David Bowman Jr., Systems and Security Manager for Jordan School District.
Bowman and his security team recognised that the district’s security landscape had changed dramatically over the years. Their previous security solution, deployed five years prior, hadn’t evolved to keep pace with the threat landscape. It also slowed down the district’s devices and networks significantly, and couldn’t meet their increasingly stringent compliance requirements.
“We needed something more adaptive and real-time to match the current threat landscape,” says Bowman. “We also needed to quantify what we were getting for what we were spending. Our existing provider’s systems didn’t give us the protection, analytics, data, reporting, or the detection and response capabilities we required.”
“The level of threat response capabilities and protection we are getting out of [TrendAI] Vision One is impactful.”
David Bowman Jr.
Systems and Security Manager, Jordan School
THE SOLUTION
AI-driven proactive endpoint defence and XDR
The district evaluated four different security providers to replace their existing system, but none of them seemed to be an improvement. Then they found TrendAI™.
“I saw that [TrendAI™] is in the leadership position on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms. That made me want to investigate them more,” says Bowman.
The district was also interested in the XDR capabilities integrated within TrendAI Vision One™. These go beyond simply identifying existing threats. “The level of threat response capabilities and protection we are getting out of TrendAI Vision One™ is impactful,” adds Bowman. The industry-leading AI security platform shows the district’s employees why a given threat matters, and how to fix it. This helped the team collect and correlate deep activity data across multiple vectors.
“It gave us a more robust tool for educating and teaching our staff,” says Bowman. Additionally, through TrendAI™, the team can access and trial emerging XDR technologies that they might not otherwise be able to afford. “The ability to test next-level solutions like [TrendAI] Vision One in our environment made a huge difference. [TrendAI] is very education-friendly,” notes Bowman.
Jordan School District also selected TrendAI Vision One™ Endpoint Security for proactive endpoint protection, bundled with the aforementioned XDR. “The comprehensive solution offered in [Endpoint Security] made the decision easier,” says Bowman. “We looked at piecemeal solutions, and by the time we added them all up—server protection, email protection, endpoint protection—it was astronomically expensive. [TrendAI Vision One] had all that built in.”
We have since seen a 40% reduction in spam and a 50% reduction in phishing attempts. [TrendAI] improved our security posture, and now I look like a hero.”
Systems and Security Manager, Jordan School
David Bowman Jr.
RESULTS
Shortly after adopting the TrendAI™ solutions, the district located a keylogger in a student’s cloud-based storage drive. Using information from TrendAI™ Cloud App Security, they were able to determine that the student wasn’t a high schooler, but an elementary school student with advanced computer science skills.
“We used a [TrendAI] alert to show the student that a tool he downloaded—which he thought was legitimate—came with a keylogger built in. It was very eye-opening for him,” says Bowman.
The district also stopped three ransomware attacks in the first month of deploying TrendAI™ solutions. “We have since seen a 40% reduction in spam and a 50% reduction in phishing attempts,” says Bowman. “[TrendAI] improved our security posture, and now I look like a hero.”
TrendAI™ is constantly evolving to help organisations stay ahead of AI-powered threats, enabling the district to meet their compliance requirements. The unified platform approach also reduced the district’s latency problem and gave them more control over alerts.
“[TrendAI] lets us modify and control security alerts so we can send them only to specific individuals in certain circumstances,” says Bowman.
ABOUT TRENDAI™
TrendAI™, the global AI security leader and enterprise business unit of Trend Micro, empowers organisations with full AI visibility and consolidated security that inspires confidence, drives innovation, and eliminates risk. Trusted by the largest enterprises and governments across 185 countries, TrendAI™ secures the entire organisation, from identities to infrastructure to data.
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