Students in 47 schools throughout Los Angeles were recently given iPads as a study tool as part of a $1B rollout to 650,000 students. It didn’t take long at all for more than 300 students to alter basic security settings and use the iPad for anything they liked. Tweets, Facebook posts and Subway Surfers were soon competing against legit academic activities.
The security gaffe and resulting embarrassment it caused to the school’s administration could have been avoided with a network data flow monitor in place. The school system’s IT staff could have been able to determine when their configured settings were being changed — and get alerted when that happened. They’d also be able to see which students were using Facebook and other sites based on monitoring the iPad’s data flow.
Tracking the Bandwidth Hoarders
Network monitoring of data flow would allow school IT administrators to identify “top talkers” and determine which iPads were consuming the most bandwidth as they tracked them to sites like YouTube. Spikes in activity caused by torrent downloads are another telltale sign that wouldn’t ordinarily occur otherwise. Network monitoring would also help track and resolve network traffic congestion by classifying the traffic by type and protocol in real time.
We Can See You
With wireless access monitoring, administrators can see who is connected to the network in real time and receive alerts when students connect to sites not approved for use in school. They can even tell from what area of the school students are accessing the network based on what wireless router they’re connecting to. This would help ascertain whether students were consuming significant amounts of data during class time or not – and if they were surfing appropriate sites, or subways.
It’s not all big brother, though. Wireless network monitoring would also help the school locate an iPad if a student misplaced or lost the tablet, and it was still on school grounds.