We live in a world immersed in cyber activity, the vast majority of which is informative for learning, helpful or good for relationships. The College, for example, has almost 1600 active network users on site daily, stores 3.8 million files in OneDrive, and in any one day can process more than 22,000 emails. We also are very aware that some of the activity can be intrusive, malicious and dangerous.

For this reason, the College invests in an industry-standard firewall that constantly searches and learns from the internet what to monitor and block and what to accept as safe. College sites use the HTTPS security protocol and we use Microsoft cloud to enhance our online security. We have separated VLANS for staff and students, lock down most administrative rights on student devices and protect the ELC and Primary and Middle and Senior systems with dual fibre pathways.

While the above has served as well, our next steps are to invest in real-time offsite backup and redundancy, extend Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to all devices and add multi-factor authentication to logins. These come at cost and take time, but the benefit is an enhanced, secure online experience for our students and staff.

Tony Shillitoe
Director of Digital Resources