Heartland AEA area schools are relying more and more each year on Internet connectivity to provide a 21st Century education to their students, and their need for bandwidth is growing exponentially. An important service provided by Heartland AEA is Internet access, which is offered free to all of our districts. While some districts choose to use other providers, Heartland AEA and the Iowa Communications Network (ICN) work together to provide Internet access to 42 of our school districts and several of our private schools.
By aggregating through Heartland AEA, participating schools save close to $1 million in connectivity costs. We place a high priority on reliable service and quick response time when contacted about problems. We know our districts rely on their Internet working efficiently 24/7/365.
Commitment to high quality service
Recent months have been particularly challenging. While the Agency’s network is “up” over 99% of the time, the networks in some of our districts have been the subject of attacks from hackers from various parts of the world, including China and Eastern Europe. These have generally been what are called “denial of service attacks.” For example, imagine you run a telemarketing firm, and one of your competitors programs their computers to call all of your phone lines every 3 seconds. That’s essentially what a denial of service attack does to an Internet connection. The network is working, but because of all of the extra traffic from hackers, it slows down considerably, sometimes to the point where it is essentially unusable. Attacks of this nature can slow down the network not just in the targeted district, but other districts as well.
In the past couple of years, service has also been interrupted or significantly slowed down due to Heartland AEA router issues, Internet filter issues and fiber optic lines being accidentally severed. Other AEAs and Internet service providers have also been the targets of denial of service attacks and similar problems, causing similar frustrations in their parts of the state.
In order to increase the reliability and security of our network, Heartland AEA is taking several steps, and considering the implementation of other safeguards. These include:
• Purchasing a new router and higher-capacity Internet content filter.
• Increasing bandwidth from the ICN from the current 3.0 Gb to 4.0 Gb after the first of the year.
• Hiring an outside firm to conduct a network penetration test - such a test identifies security holes in a network and leads to recommendations to strengthen it against outside attacks or hackers.
• Purchasing and implementing more robust network monitoring software than the Agency currently uses.
• Providing training in network security and troubleshooting for IT staff members at the AEA and district levels.
• Testing network circuits in each district/school to which the Agency provides Internet aggregation. Gathering these baseline data while the network is working well with help identify problems when troubleshooting is necessary.
We are confident these steps will help to improve our network performance, and we look forward to working together to strengthen our network security. If you would like additional information, please contact Lance Wilhelm, Director of Technology, at lwilhelm@heartlandaea.org or Tuan Dao, Network Administrator, tdao@heartlandaea.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment