How Qualys network security tools protect University of Westminster from cyber threats

The university's network security officer Ashley Pereira on why the institution chose QualysGuard Cloud Platform to protect against threats

Based in the heart of London, the University of Westminster caters for more than 20,000 students and 4,500 staff.

That leaves the institution's network security officer Ashley Pereira with a huge task in protecting networks from cyber risks such as zero day threats and spear phishing, with the likes of vulnerability management, patching, device management and security policies all coming under his regular remit.

That's why the University of Westminster selected the QualysGuard Cloud Platform integrated solutions suite to simplify the process of keeping the network protected from cyber threats.

"There's a lot to take on during my day-to-day, and Qualys saves a lot of time," Pereira told Computing.

"I quickly navigate through to the portal, kick off a scan and then get back some very detailed information that I can use to inform the necessary people we've got vulnerabilities on our network," he said, adding that the subsequent generated report makes it simple to determine an "action plan" for combating vulnerabilities.

"A lot of that can be derived from the Qualys report because it tells you what the vulnerability is, where the patch can be downloaded from and then it's a case of the system admin owners making a request to upgrade that service," Pereira explained.

Prior to adopting Qualys, the university didn't have the capability to monitor vulnerabilities across the entirety of its IT estate, especially when more and more devices have become reliant on being connected to the internet.

"We didn't really have a tool that could give us complete visibility of all of our IT assets across the whole of the university," admitted Pereira.

"So while you might just take things into account from the server side, there are other endpoints that are connected as well: the student labs, the corporate machines and other things such as printers. They can potentially be a mode from which somebody may attack, so we need to be conscious of all endpoints that connect via IP."

While the previous solution didn't provide full visibility of connections to the network, Qualys has made sure that is not the case and without having an effect on network users.

"Before it was a cumbersome task to get scans working while having no impact on the endpoint, while the scans we're doing now have zero impact on service delivery," Pereira explained.

How Qualys network security tools protect University of Westminster from cyber threats

The university's network security officer Ashley Pereira on why the institution chose QualysGuard Cloud Platform to protect against threats

The University of Westminster had examined the possibility of adopting an alternative vulnerability management tool, but Pereira and his team were most impressed with what QualysGuard Cloud Platform had to offer.

"We did look at some other solutions but they didn't seem to be as mature end-to-end, as in how they look and feel, and how they actually operate," he said, adding that the way QualysGuard Cloud Platform allowed a straightforward way of generating both simple and complex reports was a great attraction.

"With information presented at the end of the report, we found that we could tally reports to technical people with information overload," he said. "Or very stripped back information like a bar chart showing how many vulnerabilities we had at the beginning of the week - and as we've deployed patches during the advertised change window in a week, it shows the decline in the number of vulnerabilities in the network."

Ultimately, the solution from Qualys has allowed the university to manage its network security in a much more efficient manner than it ever previously had, allowing the institution to tailor strategy to counter specific threats.

"It's given us complete visibility of any devices connected to our network which is something we didn't have before. Now when you have those benefits you know where you need to deploy resources," said Pereira.

The simplicity of the solution means that Pereira has the opportunity to free up the security team as other staff are able to operate the QualysGuard Vulnerability Management tool.

"It allows us to delegate some of the actual scanning to the system administrator owners, so it's not necessarily a function done by the security team; the system administration owners can interface with the tool as well to do scans at any point of the day should they need to," Pereira explained, adding that scans are now taking place more regularly.

"We're also doing weekly scans across our estate which is having no impact, so we're getting some good visibility of that."

So has Qualys had a positive impact on the way the University of Westminster manages network security?

"Definitely," Pereira replied without hesitation.