Tackling Annual Summer Reimaging

The Challenges Campuses Face ENDPOINT SECURITY Keeping track of these new devices, platforms, applications and Whether the institution owns the devices or they are owned by technologies can seem overwhelming when campus IT staff students, and whether they’re Mac, Windows, Chromebook or another has to manually reimage endpoints and perform day-to-day system, campus IT must keep pace with the proliferation of devices, support and troubleshooting.

Many of them spend too much says Richy Anderson, a Senior Sales Engineer with Quest KACE. time firefighting, worrying about the risks of security breaches and are stretched too thin. This leads to a greater risk of missing “It boils down to understanding what’s on your network, and how to vulnerabilities.

IT administrators need to have the bandwidth and manage what you have in terms of devices,” he says. “Being able ability to be proactive, keep up-to-date with the latest technology, to identify what devices are located on your connected campus and get involved in technology planning and decision-making to helps you build out a security plan that protects you against those mitigate cyber risks. who are trying to hack into those devices and systems.” I T BOI LS DOWN TO U N D E RSTAN D IN G WH AT ’S ON YOU R N E TWO RK , A N D H OW YO U MA NAGE WHAT YOU D ON ’T KN OW YOU HAVE IN T E RMS O F D E V IC E S.” – RICHY ANDERSON, SENIOR SALES ENGINEER WITH QUEST KACE 2 Endpoint Summer Reimaging Summer reimaging projects consume a lot of the IT team’s time, as they must reimage all endpoints before new students arrive on campus. They also need to manage faculty and staff undergoing turnover from one school year to the next. Traditionally, colleges and universities manually reimage devices and endpoints, but the success of that process depends on when the data was last updated — and whether it was done correctly in the first place, according to Anderson. I F SOM EONE MI SSES AN I NV ENTORY CYC LE, TH AT CAN S ET THE DATA BAC K T WO WEEK S, TWO M ONTHS OR A N ENTI R E SEMESTER.” – RICHY ANDERSON, SENIOR SALES ENGINEER WITH QUEST KACE “If someone misses an inventory cycle, that can set the data back two weeks, two months or an entire semester,” he says. “This can lead to a constant need for day-to-day firefighting.” Rather than reacting to incidents, IT administrators should be spending their time understanding what is happening on their networks. They should be keeping tabs on whether students are accessing sites that make the college or university networks vulnerable to a security threat. Anderson notes that administrators can take steps to combat such problems, but if they’re reimaging manually, they end up being needlessly inefficient and intermittently ineffective. 3