Ayrshire College

Company Intro

Ayrshire College provides further and higher education to students in the Ayrshire region of Scotland. The college has over 10,000 students and offers courses in a range of industries including Engineering & Construction, Creative, Business & Computing, Care & Early Years, and social sciences. Ayrshire’s mixed offering of full-time, part-time, and evening courses means that students range from school pupils, to leavers preparing to start their career and professionals retraining after the COVID-19 pandemic. Ayrshire College has over 800 staff including a dedicated team responsible for IT security, servers, networks, and identity management.

The Problem

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) issued multiple alerts detailing ransomware attacks against schools, colleges, and universities in the UK throughout 2021, with a number of high-profile attacks causing damage in terms of lost data and access to critical services. After observing these alerts and establishing that phishing was one of their biggest risk vectors in the education sector, the Ayrshire College team wanted to ensure they had the right tools in place to combat sophisticated phishing threats.

The ongoing shift towards blended learning and working, expedited by the COVID-19 pandemic, contributed to Ayrshire College’s growing cyber risk. Unlike when staff are working on-site at one of Ayrshire’s three main campuses, home workers lack the protection of the college’s firewalls. For these remote workers, malicious emails must be prevented from even entering mailboxes in the first place.

Beyond their curriculum, Ayrshire College wants to instill essential life skills, digital skills, and continuous cyber education into their employee base, allowing these skills to filter down to their student body. To protect the college from reputational damage, financial damage, and business disruption, the IT team wanted to boost the organization’s security knowledge and cyber confidence, and inform staff on what to look for in terms of cyber attacks.

Although the college had successfully implemented an email gateway, phishing attempts were still entering their systems. The Ayrshire team wanted an additional layer of protection to work with their existing email gateway and secure Office 365, as well as help increase their organization’s cyber awareness to prevent attacks in the long term.