South Bound Brook School District improved efficiency and effectiveness of their cyber security using WithSecure™ Elements Endpoint Protection and WithSecure™ Elements Endpoint Detection and Response.

South Bound Brook School District, located in Somerset County, New Jersey, serves over 400 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Chief Technology Officer, Lenny Libitz, has nearly 25 years’ experience in educational IT, working with a team in large districts to manage over 45 schools and admin­istrative buildings, to his current role at SBBSD, where he's the one man in charge.

The challenge for educational IT resources

Regardless of district size, the unique threats to school districts are something Libitz has seen evolve firsthand from the mid-1990’s when malware was just a nuisance, to weapon­ized attacks to which many schools are ill-prepared to respond.

A key issue Libitz faces as the sole technology manager in his building is that he manages everything: the entire network infrastructure, endpoints, student information systems, and managing technical policies for the district…the list is long and difficult to manage, even for someone with his tenure. But he's dedicated.

“A lot of school districts in the state, and probably the entire country, have a similar issue where it’s just one person who’s your math or science teacher slash IT person so they have 50-75 students, are responsible for the curriculum of that course, scoring and testing and doing assessments, talking to parents and on top of that have to deal with infrastructure, device deployment, securing devices.”

In addition to ensuring the district is always up and running, a key concern Libitz works to mitigate is protecting students’ personal information. Young people are untapped identities, and in the event of a data breach, their lives could be disrupted for many years to come.

WithSecure Elements: A cyber security solution that fits

The budget constraints and lack of technical employees isn’t an issue Libitz sees getting better for school districts of any size, so he wanted to ensure he had a security product that could support him.

“Working by yourself, things can fall through the cracks if it’s not well thought out and planned correctly. There are moments where I’m not here, I’m everywhere else but here, so I must have the ability at a moment’s notice to get a notification on my phone if something’s going down because it could be several hours before I get back to the seat.”

Libitz evaluated several solutions, and ultimately selected WithSecure™ Elements Endpoint Protection (EPP) and WithSecure™ Elements Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) because he was confident that the product worked based on years of strong performance in independent third-party evaluations. His confidence continued to rise when he was able to quickly deploy the trial and see that the product had improved since his previous demo a few years previously.

“Being the solo person here, this product’s made my life easier. I was up and running within a half hour, and then massaging policies to fit our needs, I was able to do it in 2 hours. This is very well thought out; everything is where it needs to be. The colors on reports, I can see things very clearly… I’ve been doing this a while and saying I can get this up and running in a few hours, that says something.”

Not only was implementation quick, Libitz appreciated the speed at which he received notifications and could resolve detections with with EDR. A challenge he’s faced with the original provider and other vendors was consistently delayed notifications, and even slower response time.

“The EDR is phenomenal. I love being able to drill down to a process running across the organization that results in an incident, I can kill the process and isolate devices within minutes which is outstanding.
Lenny Libitz, Chief Technology Officer

But most important to Libitz was the support offered by the vendor. He wanted to avoid the experience of “here’s your license, have a nice day”, which he’s encountered many times before. It’s all about relationship building for Libitz.

“Having the ability to contact your sales rep and support to have a conversation, you have to understand this is a relationship between our district and WithSecure™ because we’re putting trust and faith in this product to protect our organization.”