Campus audited for threats

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), in Brisbane, is one of Australia’s most successful universities with emphasis on courses and research. With 40,000 students and 3800 employees across a global network, QUT, like many institutions of higher learning, has to ensure that file attributes, network device configurations and data structures are not unknowingly changed - either through internal accidents or from malicious outside attacks.

“As an international institution operating from many locations, we need to be able to detect any changes or threats. By detecting an issue early, we can prevent file damage, save time, maintain productivity and ensure all files remain in a known and trusted state,” said Adrian Yarrow, Manager, Enterprise Servers and Storage, QUT.

“For QUT, any undesirable changes or threats to file integrity can greatly impact the institution. Key concerns for QUT include student and employee privacy, protecting assets and maintaining productivity. If an undesirable change occurs, QUT’s IT team must quickly pinpoint the change, prevent further file damage or downtime, and restore files to a known and trusted state to ensure that any impact is minimal.

“The university prides itself on using the latest technology to make learning stimulating and enjoyable. It is for this reason QUT implemented Tripwire Enterprise, a configuration assessment and change auditing solution, in order to monitor and detect such changes. Tripwire Enterprise allows QUT to gain complete IT infrastructure integrity across its three campuses and maintain its reputation as a centre of technology excellence.

“We chose Tripwire Enterprise based on our previous experience with Tripwire for Servers and Tripwire Manager. As our infrastructure grows and we increase our number of virtual servers, we need a solution that we can trust to give us better visibility into our overall configuration and change management processes,” said Yarrow.

“With more than 700 servers to monitor, Tripwire Enterprise has made detecting and reporting changes and/or threats a lot simpler. We can monitor servers, network devices, firewalls and desktops across distributed physical and virtual IT infrastructure from one central location,” adds Yarrow.