A.T. Still University Realizes High-Performance Connectivity and Zero Trust Security

The ATSU IT team had a high total cost of ownership (TCO) fueled by expensive infrastructure and operational complexity. University students using Guest Wi-Fi and high-priority-demanding voice and video applications put pressure on the available MPLS bandwidth. Upgrading the MPLS circuit would increase the university costs significantly. Moreover, installing, configuring, operating, and managing two different network islands for remote workers and university sites was complex, time consuming, and expensive.

ATSU started exploring alternative options to have a unified network policy for remote workers and university sites while improving application performance without compromising security. It required a solution that could deploy quickly, provide security, enable better visibility, limit downtime, and deliver exceptional user experience. Additionally, the university’s sites require high availability with simplified routing.

With the Netskope SASE Gateway’s Network Security feature, a secure overlay is automatically created between the edges. ATSU remote staff could connect to redundant data centers with a secure overlay for high availability using a one-click centralized policy without requiring complex configuration.

Additionally, Netskope provided secure access by deploying zero trust principles to control traffic flows and isolate trust boundaries, enabling identity-aware-perapp access policies for the end-user, as well as through application-aware stateful firewall and filtering of unwanted content categories.

Traditional wide area network (WAN) and infrastructure at geographically dispersed sites is expensive, with per-location costs reaching tens of thousands of dollars. ATSU was able to purchase inexpensive circuits from carriers, and use Netskope One SD-WAN architecture to deliver high-quality video, voice, and data to each facility in the network.