The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a highly influential postgraduate institution of art and design. Based in London, United Kingdom, with campuses across South Kensington Battersea and White City, the organization exclusively offers postgraduate degrees in art and design to students from over 60 countries – and it is the only college in the United Kingdom to do so. In 2020, the RCA was placed first in the art and design subject area in the QS World University Rankings for the sixth year in a row and is regularly cited as a world-leading education institution. Its alumni include David Hockney, James Dyson, Ridley Scott, and Alan Rickman.
The Story
Managing and Securing Remote Learning Environments
When the RCA initiated a review of its information security practices, the institution identified device management as a crucial area for improvement. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and a surge in remote working and learning, having the ability to gain full visibility into the status of the device estate became a top priority.
Under lockdown rules, the institution closed all of its campuses, and teaching, learning, and assessment activities continued wholly online. The growing popularity of the RCA in terms of students and staff meant that the organization needed to seek new ways to manage its 550+ laptop estate. Absolute Software was called in to ensure high standards of security were in place across its Windows-based fleet.
Security Needs
Device Tracking
& Recovery
Visibility
Into Incidents
Identify &
Contain Issues
“The Absolute Secure Endpoint solutions which we implemented has delivered everything we hoped for and more, giving us complete visibility into security risks and enabling us to protect endpoints from hostile threats with the latest encryption and anti-malware technologies."
TIM BLACKMAN
INFORMATION SECURITY MANAGER
ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART
The Solutions
How They Did It
Tracking and Recovering Devices
The RCA implemented Absolute Resilience, which is part of the Absolute Secure Endpoint product suit, to manage its entire fleet of Windows-based devices. The capabilities delivered by the product enabled information security managers to identify and discover unused or missing laptops, as well as easily recover and re-activate devices in question.
Keeping Cyber Protections Up-to-Date
The organization can now quickly update security scripts across Windows-based devices, meaning it can ensure encryption and cyber protection systems are installed, up to date, and running. In addition, the IT team has full visibility into the status and health of devices, meaning it can plan for upgrades and updates as and when required.
Defending Against Hostile Threats
Blackman continued: “The Absolute solution which we implemented has delivered everything we hoped for and more, giving us complete visibility into security risks and enabling us to protect endpoints from hostile threats with the latest encryption and anti-malware technologies. At a time when remote working and learning is seen as the new normal, the importance of being able to track and protect all devices within your laptop estate is more important than ever.”
The Results
Continual Support and Protection
As part of the partnership, Absolute’s services team and cybersecurity experts is providing ongoing support and consultancy, enabling the RCA to continue to protect its device estate and ensure the latest cyber protection updates are installed.
For the RCA, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Enables information security managers to identify unused or missing laptops as well as easily recover and re-activate those devices
- Quickly updates security scripts across Windows-based devices, allowing it to ensure encryption and cyber protection systems are installed, up to date, and running
- Provides full visibility into the status and health of devices, allowing it to plan for upgrades and updates when required
Absolute Platform FAQ
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.
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