Educational Institutions Turn To Comodo For Security

Republished By Plato

Followers: 0

Reading Time: 3 minutes

esm-panoramic-view[1] Comodo, as a matter of company policy, supports education in the United States and provides our security products at reduced rates to meet their security needs. In recent years, Comodo’s presence in educational systems has grown significantly.

Licking R-VIII School District

This week, we published a case study on Comodo’s website of the Licking R-VIII School District’s experience with implementing Comodo Endpoint Security Manager (CESM). Licking is a K12 educational institution in Missouri with only a 2 man IT staff to support 500 computers, and another 200 computers being installed this year. Technology Director Michael Allen was in serious need of help. Their current internet and endpoint protection strategy consisted of an unmanaged antivirus system that failed to stop numerous infections

After some research and test trials, they chose Comodo Endpoint Security as their managed security solution. Allen was particularly pleased with the “generous” discounts offers to educational institutions and surprised at the high level of support they received from Comodo’s business and technical support teams during implementation.

So, what were the results? According to Allen, “Over and above the discount and having Comodo’s team set up our environment for us, we have seen our network being completely cleaned up by Comodo’s software finding and eliminating all the infections that were completely invisible to previous product. Not only is our network clean, but not one of our systems has been infected since we implemented our new product nearly 8 months ago.”

Because Comodo ESM has saved them so much support time and freed up more computers for students to use, Allen added “I can honestly say I love this product”.

Providing Comodo ESM with educational discounts is not the only example of Comodo’s emphasis on supporting educational institutions. In 2010, Comodo formed a partnership with Incommon.org, a division of Internet2, to provide low cost security certificates to universities and colleges in the United States.

Partnership with InCommon

InCommon provides the U.S. research and higher education with a framework of trust for the safe sharing of online resources. The partnership between InCommon and Comodo CA Ltd. offers U.S. higher education institutions with unlimited certificates for one annual fee, providing substantial cost and overhead savings. Subscribers may issue unlimited Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates, including extended validation (EV), client (personal) certificates, and code signing certificates for all of the domains they own or control such as .edu, .org, .net, .com and others.

Comodo has operates a similar service with TERENA, the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association. TERENA’s positive association with Comodo, and its significant software development using the Comodo APIs, made this partnership attractive to InCommon and Internet2.

Working together, the partnership has issued tens of thousands of certificates to more than hundreds of colleges and universities. One large state university system and current subscriber anticipates an annual savings of about $325,000. Additionally, many large, individual campuses report savings of $75,000-$90,000 per year.

“We are in the $15,000 bracket for large Internet2 members, so our cost savings is roughly in the $65,000-75,000 range annually compared to our previous certificate provider,” said one subscriber. “That ends up being a four-to-five-times return on investment.”

“We are proud of our partnership with InCommon and ability to deliver trust and savings to colleges and universities throughout the country,” said Melih Abdulhayoglu, CEO and chief security architect of Comodo. “These website security measures will enable students and faculty members to perform secure communication and transactions online by fortifying the IT networks of higher education systems against security breaches and the leakage of digital information.”