4-page Case Study - Posted 11/9/2006
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Dutch University Speeds Information Access by Upgrading Network Security Gateway
INHOLLAND University in the Netherlands is one of the largest schools in the country, with 11 campuses and a student population of about 35,000. The school has built a reputation for being able to provide a rich technology environment for students and faculty. To further enhance its IT systems, the INHOLLAND IT department became an early adopter of Microsoft® Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006. Once deployment is complete, IT administrators expect ISA Server 2006 to deliver more efficient access to internal Web sites due to faster user authentication, better performance through server load balancing, and easier management with the software’s management tools.
Situation
INHOLLAND University is one of the largest public schools in the Netherlands. Created through the merger of four schools in 2002, INHOLLAND today serves about 35,000 students in 11 cities in the country’s western region. In addition to offering bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in a range of disciplines, the school conducts research in partnership with corporate sponsors.
Most higher education in the Netherlands is provided through public schools, which com¬pete aggressively for students. After the 2002 merger, INHOLLAND was in a unique position because it could create—almost from scratch—an advanced information technology environment that could serve as an incentive to attract students.
“Following the merger, we decided that we had an opportunity to create an extensive and feature-rich IT environment for students that would put us ahead of our competitors,” says Ben Gorter, Director of the INHOLLAND IT department. “We wanted to implement new technologies to support an advanced infrastructure using products from proven vendors, such as Cisco networking equipment and HP and Dell server and desktop hardware.”
The school chose Microsoft® software, including the Windows Server™ 2003 operating system and SQL Server™ 2000. To provide security for Internet access, the university installed Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000.
As the technology infrastructure evolved and students began taking full advantage of features like shared workspaces and the Blackboard e-learning environment, the university’s technical staff began evaluating emerging technologies that could help streamline both the use and management of IT resources. In particular, the university wanted to make it easier for students to log on to the IT network from various locations, while easing the administrative tasks associated with managing network security.
Solution
INHOLLAND University decided to become an early adopter of Microsoft ISA Server 2006, which provides several new and enhanced features. ISA Server 2006 offers a compre¬hensive tool set for “publishing,” or providing access to, Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server, as well as extensions to Windows Server 2003 R2 for streamlined security and connectivity. New capabilities include single sign-on for users, more centralized management capabilities, and increased security for Web-based applications.
The university is deploying ISA Server 2006 in several phases, beginning with proof-of-concept and pilot stages. It anticipates going to full production mode when the final version of ISA Server 2006 is released. In addition to servers at the INHOLLAND data center, 12 servers are being upgraded at 6 university campuses, with 2 servers on each campus. INHOLLAND is holding a workshop for IT administrators to familiarize them with the new management interface and features in ISA Server 2006.
At INHOLLAND University, the initial ISA Server 2006 topology includes a configuration storage server running ISA Server 2006 Enterprise Edition, an ISA Server array that provides secure Internet access for students and faculty, and another ISA Server array that is deployed in the school’s perimeter network for publishing internal resources.
Benefits
The INHOLLAND University IT staff expects the new solution to deliver several benefits, both to users and system administrators. With the single sign-on feature, students will benefit from the convenience of logging on just once and being able to access many different links and resources within the school’s network. The Load Balancing feature of ISA Server 2006 will help distribute network traffic more evenly over more servers, which in turn will help improve the overall performance of the system. And the man¬agement tools in ISA Server 2006 will help the IT department streamline administration tasks.
Single Sign-On Streamlines Information Access
The single sign-on feature of ISA Server 2006 is especially useful at the university, which has dispersed campuses and students who often move among different locations. Single sign-on allows students, faculty, and admin¬istration members to log on just once to gain access to multiple Web sites without being required to authenticate with each site.
“We definitely see a trend toward students moving around campuses and cities,” says Gorter. “The benefit of the single sign-on is that it greatly streamlines a student’s ability to get information on the network, regardless of where he is. For example, a student working from home or from an Internet kiosk can log on and have access to his complete dig¬ital environment just like he would see it on campus, without logging on multiple times to get to various network resources.”
This feature is especially useful for the university’s intranet, called INsite, which is built on SharePoint Portal Server and distributed across several servers. Previously, a user would have to log on numerous times to access the resources available across mul¬tiple servers; now the user can do it just once.
Single sign-on is also very helpful for streamlining the use of other technologies like Microsoft Office Outlook® Web Access. “In the old environment, when a student clicked a link in Outlook Web Access, he would have to log on again just to be able to open the link,” says Gorter. “ISA Server 2006 greatly simplifies the user authentication process, which makes it easier for students and faculty to quickly gain access to internal university resources.”
Load Balancing Enhances Performance
In addition to easier, faster access to the school’s information, ISA Server 2006 also helps improve system performance through its enhanced load balancing functionality.
Web-based applications and Web sites typically are hosted by multiple servers in order to increase availability. In the past, the university has shared the load from Internet traffic on two servers, which often was inad¬equate to handle network traffic.
With its new Web Publishing Load Balancing feature, ISA Server 2006 can balance the request stream coming from remote users to a published Web farm. All the requests from the same client session are relayed to the same server, thus maintaining the application context and potentially saving the need to deploy network load balancing on the published array.
“This helps us ensure that the load from network traffic can be spread around to more than the two servers when needed, which increases performance for our end users,” says Gijs Janssen, Technical Specialist for the INHOLLAND IT department.
Manageability of Tasks Improves
Janssen says ISA Server 2006 will help the university spend less time managing network security tasks. Under the old system, INHOLLAND IT staff would need to manage and monitor separate servers for internal and external resources. ISA Server 2006 enables the IT staff to consolidate all management tasks for different resources within one management console.
Management capabilities include detailed logs for inbound and outbound access, automatic report generation, real-time monitoring and log filtering of all active connections through a firewall, and connection verifiers that allow administrators to monitor connections to a specific computer or URL. ISA Server 2006 also provides an enhanced monitoring capability that presents a summarized version of key ISA Server status information across the university.
“Before, we had to manage two different ISA environments—an internal environment with 4 servers and an external environment with 14 servers,” says Janssen. “But now with ISA Server 2006, we can share and manage both the internal and external resources from 1 management console. From an IT perspec¬tive, ISA Server 2006 provides the kind of features that help free up our staff time so we can focus on other tasks and get more work done during the day.”
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For more information about INHOLLAND University, visit the Web site at:
http://www.inholland.com/
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