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Inbuilt cyber security protection

DDoS mitigation a success story for Belfast Met college.

Belfast Met College students
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Belfast Met College students
CC BY-NC-ND

"The mitigation service is excellent. It really works. It does what you expect it to do and it delivers."

Liam Downey, IT operations manager, Belfast Met


Challenge

Belfast Met College
Creative Commons attribution information
Belfast Met College
CC BY-NC-ND

Institution profile:

Belfast Met college was founded in 1906 and is the largest further and higher education college in Northern Ireland, and the 10th largest in the UK.

It has an average annual enrolment of more than 35,000 students studying across six campuses.

Around 9,500 students are in full-time HE courses and around 25,000 in FE/leisure courses.

Products used:

Critical services protection (formerly enhanced DDoS mitigation)

Download the full case study

Between 2014 and 2016, Belfast Met suffered three severely disruptive DDoS attacks.

The college uses Office 365 and stores as many applications and user files as possible in the cloud.

As a result, when the attacks knocked out connectivity, the impact on students and staff was immense.

Liam Downey, IT operations manager, said:

“We faced interrupted access to email, our virtual learning environment, library systems – all those systems we store in the cloud. Teaching had to revert to chalk and talk. Administrative processes simply stopped.”

Solution

We suggested the college trialled its enhanced DDoS mitigation service in which our team monitors the Janet Network for any DDoS attacks and steps in if we detect one.

When Belfast Met faced another DDoS attack, the mitigation service proved its worth.

The college was in mitigation for three weeks, but Liam said:

“The only reason we knew about it was because Janet was telling us that we were in mitigation and scrubbing our data.

"We had no disruption. Our users had no idea.

"That’s our success story.”

Read our article about the DDoS mitigation service and hear from New College Durham on how they're dealing with DDoS.

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