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...teachers parents," says Nancy Stutsman, Monte Cassino's director of technology. "and we view that interaction as a vital component of each student's academic success. We use e-mail to keep parents informed about school announcements, scheduling changes, student progress, and behavioral concerns. It's really another educational tool."
When the system was hit six years ago by a major virus attack, the school turned to Cupertino, CA-based IT security vendor Symantec (www.symantec.com) for its well-known anti-virus solutions. But because the e-mail addresses of the school's 130 teachers were widely circulated and frequently posted on the internet, it wasn't long after the virus was cleaned up that spam began choking the system. At one point, 40 percent of the 1,000 inbound e-mail messages the school received on average each week were spam.
To fend off this type of assault, the school expanded its relationship with Symantec to include a hosted e-mail security solution. A hosted solution is a software package that resides on the vendor's server and is managed by that vendor. "The customers don't have to install any hardware or software in-house," explains Symantec Product Manager Chuck Egress. "They direct their e-mail traffic through Symantec servers via changes to MX records and DNS. And the mail is filtered for spam and viruses on our machines before it reaches their networks."
Monte Cassino is just one example of the growing number of schools that have decided to outsource various combinations of their infrastructure/application management to cope with increasingly challenging IT environments.
ASPs and MSPs
Third-party IT systems management companies come in two basic flavors: managed service providers (MSPs), which focus on an organization's software infrastructure; and application service providers (ASPs), which address the application layer.
MSPs manage infrastructure software owned by their customers--things like operating systems, security solutions, storage applications, and networking software. They administer these systems remotely on a continuous basis, providing regular upgrades and maintenance behind the scenes.
Examples of MSPs are Totality (recently purchased by...
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More articles from T H E Journal (Technological Horizons In Education)
Getting beyond break/fix: as long as the help desk is thought of only ..., November 01, 2006
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