Northeastern Illinois University Leverages Symantec Solutions to Boost Efficiency, Improve Backup and Tighten Security in Virtual and Physical IT Environments

Northeastern Illinois University Leverages Symantec Solutions to Boost Efficiency, Improve Backup and Tighten Security in Virtual and Physical IT Environments

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – April 2, 2012 – Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that Northeastern Illinois University is using a combination of Symantec’s backup and security software solutions to implement an IT consolidation program across virtual and physical environments to simultaneously break down organizational silos, reduce costs, improve backup and tighten messaging security. Since the consolidation program has been deployed, Northeastern Illinois University has improved IT effectiveness and sharply reduced its vulnerability to malicious email spam exploits.

“Our staff is overburdened with the challenge of managing existing IT services while addressing new educational and operational requirements,” said Kim Tracy, executive director of University Technology Services. “Anything we can do to offload the complexity allows us to focus on improving and developing new services to help the efficiencies of our faculty and staff and enhance the educational experience of our students.”

Seamlessly Consolidating Backup and Recovery

In an effort to standardize the University’s IT environment, all backup and recovery was consolidated to Symantec NetBackup.

“No changes were needed to our backup and recovery infrastructure. It was important to have a unified view across virtual and physical environments; this is what NetBackup provides,” said Tracy. Virtual machine protection is simplified by centralizing backup across both Microsoft® Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, speeding up backup times through deep API integration.

Cloud-Based Messaging Improves Security, Reduces Costs

Northeastern Illinois University was inundated with phishing and spear-phishing attacks, consuming 40-50 hours of staff time each month. Plus, with more than 16,000 mailboxes and 80 percent of mail as spam, this translated into significant traffic and bandwidth issues. To deal with the onslaught of incoming mail, an additional mail gateway had to be added, which sharply increased operating expenditures.

“Rather than having 200,000-plus spam pounding at my mail gateway every day, I wanted to make this someone else’s problem by moving to a cloud,” said Tracy. “There are some things that simply make more sense if they are in the cloud. Messaging security is one of them.”

The University selected Symantec Email Security.cloud as its multiple layers of scanning technologies provide added protection against both known and unknown threats. Plus, Symantec’s service level agreement gave the IT team additional peace-of-mind

Endpoint Security Software Halts Malicious Attacks

Struggling with periodic security attacks, Northeastern Illinois University upgraded to Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 as it offers state-of-the-art defense against all types of attacks for both physical and virtual systems. Since the upgrade, NEIU hasn’t experienced any malicious intrusions.

“The centralized security console provides us with a view across all of our endpoints, enabling us to take a more proactive approach to endpoint security,” said Tracy. “Symantec Endpoint Production 12 has proven to be much less taxing on our Windows XP and 7 clients, especially at startup time. Plus, the enhanced virtualization support is a necessary feature as we plan to virtualize additional servers in the future.”

About Symantec

Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available at www.symantec.com.