The Hotchkiss School Consolidates Security Tools, Enhancing Security, Visibility, and Control

Warenda’s team can’t simply lock down all potentially risky behavior either. Students need access to information on all sorts of topics that would be blocked by default in enterprises: “They could be studying for a project on gambling, or malware even,” says Warenda, “and we need to allow for that.” What’s more, the school also acts as an ISP for its boarding students and some staff, so it needs to tailor network access to residential connections in a different way than its school network.

Like a seasoned schoolmaster who has complete control of their class at all times, the Netskope CASB provides Hotchkiss’ security team with inline visibility and control for thousands of apps in use, including users, file names, activity, and other contextual information. The solution provides a deep understanding of cloud service usage and will eventually enable the school to define targeted security policies based on categories including user, app, instance, risk, activity, data, and device type.

Moving forward, another key capability of the Netskope CASB for the Hotchkiss school is that it can enable real-time notifications, such as user coaching around risky activities and moving sensitive data. Over time, this will help the school change risky behaviors and ensure that its other security tools are being used to their full advantage.

Once Hotchkiss has achieved complete inline cloud visibility and has a sense of the challenges it faces, the school plans to use Netskope in several ways. First, it will ensure good security hygiene through real-time prompts to users, for example by telling them not to download sensitive data on a personal storage account. Second, it will use intelligence from Netskope to enrich the data it sends to its managed detection partners, helping to identify trends and improve decision making. Third, Netskope will help the school control access in a highly flexible way that’s ideal for its unique needs.

Warenda adds: “There’s a lot of companies with great point solutions. But Netskope provides a complete end-to-end capability with a single agent, and every element of the solution is as good as the next. Netskope is that rarest of things: a jack of all trades and a master too. This is a huge benefit as it means we only need to implement one solution, not three or four, and that we can manage everything from the one console.”