Manchester Education Trust

Manchester Education Trust approached Pentesec seeking a solution that would increase the resilience of their cyber estate, enhance visibility and future-proof them against potential threats. Pentesec proposed two of its Rapid7-powered managed services: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), and Vulnerability Management (VM).

THE CHALLENGE: FUTURE-PROOFING AGAINST INCREASED CYBERCRIME IN THE EDUCATION SECTOR

Greater Manchester Education Trust is a secondary education provider made up of four schools in and around the Manchester area.

Due to the recent rise in cyber attacks in the education sector, the Trust approached Pentesec, seeking to increase the resilience of its cyber estate and future-proof against potential threats. In particular, the Trust was interested in finding new ways to efficiently investigate alerts from existing tools, and implement the necessary level of visibility across their cyber estate.

OUR APPROACH: A POWERFUL MIX OF PRE-BUILT AND BESPOKE SOLUTIONS

To offer full visibility of the Trust’s cyber environment, Pentesec proposed two Rapid7-powered managed services: Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), and Vulnerability Management (VM).

These pre-built solutions quickly and efficiently gave additional assurance, increasing visibility and giving the IT team extra time to focus on internal development. However, the Trust also wished to implement a system to filter alerts and present them in an intelligent way to allow the IT team to prioritise them.

To do this, we implemented custom alerting to ensure event management could be delegated to the Pentesec team, while the Trust’s IT team can focus on other value-adding tasks.

Pentesec helped the Trust to fortify its threat intelligence and leaked credentials datasets by using SIEM information, Rapid7 community feeds and extracts that the customer had imported into its firewalls for perimeter protections.

Our unique set up provides a network of information, enabling us to score vulnerabilities and prioritise resources.

- Pentesec SOC Manager

THE RESULTS: A SAFE CYBER ENVIRONMENT FOR STUDENTS AND STAFF

Pentesec’s SIEM and VM managed services provide the Trust with a crystal clear picture of what is happening within their environment.

Enabling their IT staff to focus on other areas of development, with the peace of mind that a state-of-the-art solution is significantly reducing cyber threats and our team of experienced professionals are actively monitoring their cyber environment 24/7.

The Trust also benefits from improved cyber security knowledge and a stronger security posture. Overall, the board feels more confident in its ability to respond to the increased levels of cybercrime that are threatening the education sector – providing a safe and protected cyber environment for students and staff alike.

Pentesec's managed services team consistently demonstrated their proactiveness in highlighting any alerts they deemed to be of a potentially serious or critical nature. Together, we found a suitable balance of what required attention. Filtering out much of the 'noise' and allowing me to prioritise investigations appropriately.

This approach and the service as a whole has been invaluable in enhancing the security of our network.

Pentesec have not only delivered outstanding solutions but also maintained an excellent level of professionalism and service quality. I could not recommend them enough.

- Mike Berry, Director of IT Infrastructure at Greater Manchester Education Trust

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