Success Stories / Education
Southern Oregon Education Service District (Southern Oregon ESD), established in 1849, oversees 13 school districts across a 10,600-square-mile geographical area which consists of almost 52,000 enrolled students and 3,500 teachers. Internally they secure up to 350 Southern Oregon ESD employees with an IT team of 9 people. Southern Oregon ESD is dedicated to enabling individual school districts and student success, which requires cultivating an environment that protects confidential data, core services, and systems.
A responsibility for Southern Oregon ESD’s Computer Information Services department is to assist each of their component school districts secure their employees and students data. Each school district’s needs vary by district size, the internal IT teams, budgets, the number of students, devices, and the current stack of IT resources. As a result, Southern Oregon ESD was searching for a scalable platform due to the different-sized school districts the security team manages. The platform had to be agnostic, include Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Services, and have multi-tenancy capabilities.
When searching for an ideal solution, Nate Davol, Senior Systems Analyst at Southern Oregon ESD, said:
“Another platform that I checked out previously was almost like a black box, and with the engineers, I couldn’t really get access to it. With Adlumin, everyone is seeing exactly the same thing with all the data, which is really nice.”
Southern Oregon ESD needed to implement a multi-tenancy solution where they could see everything in one place and cater to the individual needs of each school district. Adlumin’s Security Operations Platform allows Southern Oregon ESD to have visuals over every school district through one platform. Each district can still operate as is and have an additional security piece on the backend for peace of mind.
Some school districts were trying to make SIEMs on their own and configure them from scratch because they couldn’t afford a solution…It really made me happy that we could get the level of coverage [from Adlumin] that is usually in private industries and corporate networks that education doesn’t get to experience because it is too expensive.”
Southern Oregon ESD required a cost-effective solution that would fit within every school district’s varying budgets. Adlumin brings an affordability piece to the security teams where they can implement an enterprise-grade solution without breaking the budget.
Coree Kelly, Southern Oregon ESD’s Chief Information Officer, mentions that they had 50% cost savings after implementing Adlumin’s Managed Detection and Response Services. They initially explored hiring an additional head that would’ve doubled the cost of outsourcing the solution.
Due to the prohibitive cost of implementing an in-house security team 24×7, Southern Oregon ESD found Adlumin’s Security Operation Platform paired with Managed Detection and Response Services to be appealing, scalable, cost-effective, and resilient.
Before Adlumin, Southern Oregon ESD would search multiple endpoints, security logs, firewalls, and Office 365/Google Workspace to find what they were looking for. With Adlumin, Davol can now write a quick query or be alerted by Adlumin’s MDR team on any failed logins or suspicious activities. Davol says:
“I have saved 5-10 hours a week just to be able to research events and be able to easily track down if there is an incident to take care of it quickly.”
-Nate Davol, Senior Systems Analyst at Southern Oregon ESD
The Southern Oregon ESD team was looking to streamline data ingestion from different sources and view everything in one place for compliance regulations, alerts, and analysis from all districts. The service district operates as a hybrid of on-prem and cloud while providing data hosting for some schools.
For example, when Southern Oregon ESD recently had an unauthorized user attempt to get through a firewall, Davol could track the activity within 5 minutes. If it weren’t for Adlumin, he would’ve had to explore multiple sources, which would take a significant amount of time.
The team’s security experience has significantly improved due to Adlumin’s Security Operations Platform’s machine learning capabilities. Adlumin gets to know their environment, what’s normal, and what’s not, and their team does not have to spend time writing rules.
“The machine learning integration was another aspect that we really liked about Adlumin. The capabilities it had. As humans, there is only so much we can parse through a day, but when throwing in machine learning that Adlumin has got on the [Security Operations Platform], it is so powerful because it can pick out those patterns much faster than a human could. And that has been a huge time saver for us.”
Adlumin works as an extended security team for Southern Oregon ESD, eliminating the need to build a fully staffed MDR team. Their in-house security operations and operational effectiveness are augmented with 24×7 coverage, a level of visibility that was not available before, and prompt responsiveness.
“The Adlumin team really bends over backward to find a solution that fits best and is willing to jump on a call anytime I have questions. The Adlumin team is really the secret piece that none of the other competitors came close to.”
-Nate Davol, Senior Systems Analyst at Southern Oregon ESD
A unified platform was Southern Oregon ESD’s top priority to protect students and staff from attacks and strengthen the cybersecurity culture across 12 out of the 13 school districts. They work with Adlumin to fill the IT gap by pulling from their pool of technical experts to help all districts, regardless of size.
With a multi-tenancy solution, each district can still integrate its existing security tools into one agnostic security operations platform. This is important to Southern Oregon ESD’s team because if a threat is made to one school district, they can look at all its environments from a bird’s eye to see if any other district is under the same attack. Kelly says:
“For the first time since I have been here in three years, we have really been able to pull everyone together for meetings, and everyone is talking about the same thing.”
Southern Oregon ESD’s long-term goal includes using Adlumin as the foundational command center for security operations within their regional security plan for the school districts. They now have a solution that can unify everyone when it has been challenging to get the same security protection for the smaller districts compared to the larger ones in the past.
“This has been more of a relationship-building journey. We have 13 school districts that all have their own staff in one way or another, and IT, whom we assist. Everyone has their own systems out there. And for us to be able to bring a system like this, that is multi-tenant, so we have visuals for the region, which has been amazing for me.”
When time is of the essence, schools need quick setups. Adlumin’s deployment was smooth, easy, and efficient, even with multiple school districts. Davol says,
“I was amazed because, within not even 2 hours, I could pull in all my data. It was great, and I was blown away that it took that little time to implement everything.”
Most solutions take days, weeks, or sometimes months to get everything working properly. Adlumin’s platform is intuitive and saves time.
When managing over a dozen school districts, Southern Oregon ESD’s team envisioned looking through one pane of glass for their security operations. Most managed services providers the team was looking at before Adlumin offered partial or bare-minimum visibility into their environment. With Adlumin, the team benefits from seeing when an alert is closed, their investigation data, and reporting and threat intelligence in one click. All 12 school districts, regardless of their security stack, are unified with one platform.
“With districts, you sometimes get different approaches to solve an issue. And this is one of the few platforms where everyone can speak the same language and see the benefit. So, it’s been a tremendous help for us.”
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About Adlumin
Adlumin Inc. provides the enterprise-grade security operations platform and managed detection and response (MDR) services that keep mid-market organizations secure. With one license and one platform, its patented technology gives organizations and solution providers everything they need for effective threat hunting, incident response, vulnerability management, darknet exposure monitoring, compliance support and much more.
The Adlumin platform is feature-rich enough for organizations to operate on their own, yet built specifically to amplify the skills and capabilities of managed service providers who use it to deliver cutting-edge security that can scale to meet the needs of any operating environment. With full access to the platform regardless of whether they are running it themselves or relying on Adlumin’s MDR services or expert partners, Adlumin gives organizations unparalleled visibility into their security posture through access to alerts, investigation data, threat intelligence, compliance reporting and everything else – all in real time.
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