For an average person, university is an institution for acquiring higher education. For an IT professional university means numerous simultaneously connected, portable and often mobile devices. And that usually means a lot of work and challenges… Let’s focus on a few of them!
When devices such as mobile clients roam around in a university’s campus infrastructure, they always face the same issue. In order to keep continuous network connectivity, the IP address cannot change irrespective of the physical location and network attachment. In network environments this is achieved by stretching the IP subnet to the location where the device resides. Stretching IP subnets across multiple floors, buildings or locations, both in wired or wireless deployments, enables hosts to move around freely, without having to change their IP addresses.
However, in today’s highly dynamic environments such as university campuses, where new devices and applications are moved, added, or changed on a regular basis, manual switch by switch configuration can be very time consuming for the IT teams. Not to mention a potential security breach resulting from human error during a change…
Modern education institutions simply can’t have that.
"Our goal is to free as much time of our IT department as possible, allowing us to focus on value-added activities for our students and researchers while offering a stable, efficient and secure network managed by a small team”, says Karin Doguet, CIO of Université libre de Bruxelles – one of the most forward-thinking educational institutions in Europe.
“We are looking for ways to simplify the network management. The goal for 2022 is to replace our current wired setup with a more automated solution to further facilitate monitoring, management and provisioning”, adds Sander Stolk, Security Officer and Board Member at the Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam – the largest and most innovative creative college for media, design and technology in the Benelux region.
So what if the only configuration you had to take care of was at the edge of the network?
Extreme Fabric Connect, an SPB solution from Extreme Networks, represents the next evolutionary step for traditional campus networks by replacing the classical hop-by-hop provisioning with edge provisioning only. That, in turn, results in unmatched simplicity and flexibility, as well as resiliency with inherent security.
The beauty of the solution is that it can work across both wired and wireless networks. Having these tightly integrated provides a seamless user experience, no matter what device or devices users attach to. It also significantly eases the administration of the network by eliminating the need to manage two disparate network environments. It is also important that consistent policies can be applied to users and devices across both wired and wireless, end-to-end.
Security? It's in our fabric!
Many university networks have grown from the setup in which all workstations had a public IP address. In addition to being able to easily extend connectivity for different devices with little to no manual configuration, Fabric Connect enables IT teams to separate groups of devices into their own secure zones or network segments, isolating them from the rest of the network.
Thanks to Extreme Fabric Connect, the problem of IP addresses has been solved.
"For example, access control, surveillance cameras and IP telephony are now in a specific segment", says Thierry Frère, Network Service Director at ULB. “These elements are separated from the users' internet traffic, which goes through another segment”.
"We are now working with dynamic IP addresses via Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol", explains Karin Doguet. "It is not only smoother, but also much more secure", she adds.
At the same time, network segmentation allows for a high level of flexibility. Researchers, for example, often need a highly secure network environment. The ULB is now able to provide it without having the entire IT department manage the cabling part of the infrastructure and/or the hardware.