CASE STUDY
University of Brighton Information Services has a small team focused predominantly on networking . It ’ s responsible for servicing and maintaining network infrastructure used by more than 19,000 students and 2,600 staff based across six campuses in Brighton and Eastbourne . The infrastructure under the team ’ s management is broad and is an essential component in enabling the university to deliver the very best digital learning experiences for students .
Challenge
The IT department approached potential suppliers as well as drawing on industry contacts , and selected a leading UK enterprise IT cybersecurity specialist , BlueFort Security , who stood out by offering assistance with our immediate issue .
Solution
BlueFort Security ’ s professional services team spent the next few days working through the issue with University of Brighton ’ s Senior Network Officer , Stephen Elliott .
Initially , University of Brighton ’ s IT team used F5 for some its more straightforward load balancing capabilities . At the start of the Coronavirus pandemic , the team migrated the University ’ s VPN service onto F5 , which soon became a critical service . However , when it moved on to access policy management features to create authentication and web frontends for some of the university ’ s more advanced applications , the team ran into some complications . What ’ s more , the team then struggled to get the specialist support it needed from its existing partners to get the live services up and running .
“ Our current suppliers at the time were completely stuck on what to do and we ’ d reached the stage where we had no other option than to ask F5 for assistance ,” said Elliott . “ Once F5 had recommended BlueFort , we spent a fair bit of time talking to its consultants and got things working within a few days . BlueFort ’ s consultants were keen to show us that they were capable of doing far more than what we initially needed and we quickly progressed to working on some of the more specialist capabilities that F5 offers .”
Since then , University of Brighton has been able to rollout more complicated applications and patch
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