Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 63 | Page 78

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The university provides innovative teaching – and a focus on impactful primary research – for 29,000 students in Coventry , London and Scarborough , and internationally in
China , Singapore and Rwanda .
personal information , Coventry University has become a prized target for cybercriminals around the world .
The volatile nature of the environment had resulted in Rogers and his team being forced to take a very reactive stance in protecting the university ’ s digital assets , frequently relying on complete disk reimaging to address compromised machines . “ Despite the measures we had in place , it was taking us several days to identify a security incident before we even began remediation procedures ,” said Rogers . “ We were having to completely overwrite around 20 disk drives each week . The resource drain on the team was enormous .”
Plugging the holes
An independent audit and gap analysis from a longtime IT partner confirmed that the weakest link in the
university ’ s defences was endpoint security and this vulnerability was being amplified by the highly diverse and unknown nature of devices connecting to the global network .
A multi-vendor Proof-of-Concept ( PoC ) enabled Rogers to determine that the CrowdStrike Falcon platform was the optimal solution to address the university ’ s endpoint challenges . To create a worldclass set of endpoint protection capabilities , the Falcon platform was deployed with Falcon Device Control endpoint device control , Falcon Complete managed detection and response ( MDR ), Falcon Discover IT hygiene , Falcon Insight endpoint detection and response ( EDR ), Falcon Overwatch managed threat hunting , Falcon Prevent next-generation antivirus , Falcon Intelligence automated threat intelligence , Falcon Firewall Management and Falcon Spotlight vulnerability management .
Immediate benefits
Implementation of the CrowdStrike suite enabled Rogers to reduce the number of vendor solutions maintained by the security team from seven to three . In addition to reducing the burden of managing this number of applications , the effectiveness of the team showed significant improvement . “ Since deploying CrowdStrike , the time spent by the infrastructure team on resolving cyberthreats went from over 80 hours
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