In France, the regional Departments carry out numerous actions in the fields of social integration, roads, the environment, tourism, education, and the fitting out of municipalities. Located in the northwest of France, Seine Maritime has a population of over 1.2 million, including approximately 64,600 students enrolled in 132 public and private schools. In partnership with the French Ministry of Education, it has been decided that all students entering the 6th grade as of the beginning of the 2022 school year will receive an iPad, which they will return at the end of the 9th grade. For the first phase, only public schools are involved.
Next Gen Secure Web Gateway (SWG) – The foundation for SSE web and cloud inline security providing threat and data protection.
Secure internet access
Full visibility into student use
Autonomy of IT teams during deployment and management
The department of Seine-Maritime decided to launch this digital education initiative. If the responsibility lies with the parents outside the school, the equipment being provided by the communities had to be compliant, with defined and secure uses, both in the school and family context.
Specifically, each tablet had to strictly prevent students from using it for entertainment purposes outside of a set time, and from accessing applications or websites not on the Academy’s whitelist; security measures that students had previously managed to bypass. In addition, it was desired that middle school students should not be able to perform certain actions online, such as liking/disliking content. Controlling screen time was also a major issue, as it was agreed that the iPads are to be used for no more than an hour a day for entertainment purposes, and not after 9pm at night.
Ensuring continuity and security of tablet use and control of online browsing according to academic goals, and regardless of where the student logs on, at school or elsewhere, was crucial.
Thanks to Netskope, the integration of the “Next-Gen SWG” solution was quick and easy, as was its adoption. The deployment was completely frictionless to students, as they did not need to install anything or take any specific steps that could disrupt their online experience.
Deployment began with six pilot schools. Following its success – despite the Apple environment, which can be complicated to protect due to certain technical aspects – the solution was deployed within two months on all student tablets, in groups of 30 schools, by the Department’s teams, who were able to draw on the expertise and availability of the Netskope team. The simplicity and flexibility of the solution was also a real asset, given the scale of the project.
This very rapid development of the educational project, while complying with navigation and online security requirements, was made possible by the Netskope’s teams’ understanding of the issues and responsibilities incumbent on local authorities and the various stakeholders, in terms of compliance with current legislation as well as ergonomics; this led to the success of the project across all colleges.
Netskope was able to perfectly meet our needs and an ambitious project: that all the schoolchildren of the department could benefit from this educational offer while guaranteeing a controlled and secure navigation, regardless of the location.
Using Netskope, the department’s cybersecurity teams were able to gain complete visibility into device activity to respond to alerts, using dashboards to quickly provide in-depth, actionable analysis. As a result, circumvention attempts were prevented and security was ensured, regardless of where college students were using their tablets.
Before Netskope was implemented, students could only connect to their middle-school’s Wi-Fi. Now, they can connect to any network because each tablet has a very specific filtering capability that they cannot bypass. This feature prevents certain pre-defined online actions, such as social media, as well as browsing websites that are not on the whitelist. In agreement with all stakeholders in the educational project, Netskope limits the amount of time spent on entertainment platforms (such as YouTube) to one hour per day and controls the amount of screen time spent per day.