When COVID-19 began to shake the world and a lockdown was necessary, schools closed their doors and faced a series of challenges, including connecting students and professors remotely to continue classes and ensuring that this online environment was safe.

It was no different for Morgan County School District in Morgan, Utah, which relied on technology from network security company Infoblox Inc. to make the transition to online classes as smooth as possible.

“Our two biggest hurdles were ramping up the devices [for students] and then … making sure the network access from a filtering and consistency standpoint was going to work.” said Ven Savage (pictured), network operations manager at the Morgan County School District.

Savage spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Infoblox Next Level Network Experience event. They discussed the experience of the Morgan County School District in the transition to the remote model during the pandemic and the tools chosen to ensure everyone’s access to the network in a secure system. (* Disclosure below.)

Migration started many years ago

The Morgan County School District had migrated to the Infoblox technology several years ago, and in October 2019, it also started using Infoblox’s cloud security tools. So from a security point of view, it already had a really good foundation, according to Savage. Infoblox focuses on managing and identifying devices connected to networks — specifically the Domain Name System, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, and IP address management (collectively known as DDI).

“It was a seamless transition in many regards. Most users didn’t even realize they were being pushed through the Infoblox’s cloud DNS server, which was providing security and filtering,” he said. “So that was a big plus for us, because it was less man-hours we had to spend troubleshooting people’s DNS resolutions.”

It was a very different experience than the school district had previously with other platforms, which used content filters that worked in conjunction with the firewall, according to Savage.

“With that product we were spending on average about three to four hours a day fixing false positives, just from a filtering aspect,” he explained. “By migrating to Infoblox, our DNS and the filtering and the security are all handling at the DNS level, and it was just much more invisible to the end user.”

Relying on filtering and feeds

The school district uses DNS security techniques in several ways. First, the filtering tool creates response policy zones to allow the district to manage DNS names or IP addresses, defining a list of unwanted addresses to be blocked.

Second, the district relies on feeds received from Infoblox, identifying bad actors, malware, attack vectors that are based, again, on DNS traffic. These have minimized system problems and provided IT staff with free time to devote to other activities, according to Savage.

“We are a very small school district in some regards. I am the only network person in the district, and there’s a total of four of us that manage the support aspect,” he said. “So being able to not have to spend time researching or tracking down breaches and attacks as much … frees me up to do other things, like in the more standard networking realm from a design and implementation aspect.”

In addition to ensuring the safety of network traffic as many other organizations need to do, the school district must comply with specific filtering laws and regulations for teachers, students and anyone using a campus-owned device. This makes the situation even more complex.

“When you’re talking about attacks, over 90% of attacks use DNS. So if I have a solution that is already providing my DNS and then wraps the security into it, it just makes the most sense for me,” Savage concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Infoblox Next Level Network Experience event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Infoblox Next Level Network Experience event. Neither Infoblox Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE