Red River’s Impact on Our Customers: IT Security for School Systems
Most schools are responsible for supporting enterprise-grade networks with round-the-clock service, funded by taxpayer budgets on more traditional schedules. However, not all school districts function the same way.
Recently, a school district in the Midwest had experienced some environmental challenges in one of their data centers – due to a power outage that occurred early on a Saturday morning over a holiday weekend, a backup generator had failed and was unable to reset. Like many businesses, schools do not generally have staff dedicated for afterhours or weekend shifts. With no one onsite, there were numerous alerts that were triggered by different systems in various departments (i.e., facilities, IT), which were difficult to decipher and required a large lift from local staff. To correlate the alerts and their causes, IT and facilities management had to sacrifice their long weekend to remotely troubleshoot until the root cause and the subsequent contributing failure were identified.
Seeing as how the alerts were generated in individual system dashboards or through email, staff who were not actively monitoring systems or their business emails over the break were initially unaware of the outage or impact. Even knowing that it was a “power outage,” staff anticipated the alerts and falsely recognized them as temporary.
“The generator was supposed to kick in and did not, where as a result, staff were unable to prevent service outages,” said Brittany Crawford, Red River Account Executive. “This mishap could have been avoided by rectifying the issue prior to the environmental challenges resulting in hard equipment failures.”
To assist in their backup recovery, Red River was able to work with the school district to provide a customized monitoring solution delivered out of its Network Operations Center (NOC) that could monitor, identify, and correlate issues more proactively.
“We were able to help the client identify mission-critical equipment in their data centers, develop a plan for notifications – what issues get what type of notification, call-tree planning to ensure appropriate department resources are notified of critical outages, escalations for non-answers, etc. – and provide a streamlined approach to minimize unplanned downtime,” said Crawford. “With our help, any client we work with can be notified of issues before they escalate and can now be more proactive in remediations with well-armed data.”
The school district facility management now enjoys their evenings, weekends, and holiday time without actively monitoring their IT systems and email servers. To accomplish this, Red River collects alerts from core and critical systems, triangulates potential root causes, and provides customized notifications via email, phone call, or text message to the appropriate staff members with initial assessments and diagnostics.
“Should a similar issue arise for the school district or another enterprise-grade network, Red River will monitor, escalate and notify the client based on criticality and severity of the issue until the appropriate resources are brought in for resolution,” continues Crawford. “With this approach, Red River can assist clients by quickly identifying root causes and impacts by producing timely resolutions that prove effective time and time again.”
In knowing that Red River’s geographic-disparate NOC remains unimpacted by weather and actively monitors the district’s critical infrastructure, local staff can spend less personal time monitoring, troubleshooting, and remediating issues and more time focusing on their personal safety and comfort.
