ABOUT GREENWOOD ACADEMIES TRUST
The Greenwood Academies Trust (GAT) currently has 36 open academies educating approximately 17,000 pupils across seven local authority areas including Nottingham City,
Nottinghamshire, Leicester City, Northamptonshire, Peterborough, Lincolnshire and Central Bedfordshire
In 2018, Equilibrium were approached by Greenwood Academies Trust to help them achieve their Cyber Essentials certification. However, instead of simply ‘getting them through the assessment’ like so many other Cyber Essentials certification bodies, we chose to meet with the academy to understand to their organisation and help to improve their overall security posture. This meant that the Cyber Essentials Plus certification would be a by-product of good security practice. Since this initial engagement and helping them comply with the Cyber Essentials criteria, we have become a trusted partner who provide advice on all of their security issues.
As a Cisco Partner with an Advanced Security Specialisation, we have many years of expertise across the Cisco Security portfolio. A key component of our expertise is web-based cloud security. Naturally, when Greenwood’s web filtering solution was up for renewal, the academy approached us to recommend a suitable replacement.
We spent some time discussing the benefits of Cisco Umbrella, the DNS-based filtering solution which has the ability to filter threats before the users’ traffic even reaches the Cisco Umbrella cloud. Although they were very interested in the product and our ability to integrate this effectively for them, we had come across the school safeguarding solution Securly that would both satisfy their requirement for strong web-filtering but also provide significant safeguarding capabilities. We identified that this solution would analyse social media posts, web searches and emails that refer to self-harm and depression. It also has a unique algorithm that can perform sentiment analysis.
Equilibrium Security’s Director, Anish Chauhan has 1 daughter in secondary school and another fast approaching. Being able to support schools with this capability is something that is personal to Anish, and goes beyond providing enterprise solutions for corporations. After working hard to get a good commercial deal for the academy, they implemented the solution within just a few days and were very happy with the solutions advanced capabilities. Moving forward, Equilibrium Security and Greenwood Academies Trust will continue to enjoy a strong collaborative working relationship.
About Securly
If you would like to find out more about how Equilibrium can support your school or university with Cyber Security requirements, please feel free to get in touch using the details below.
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