Institutions collect a large amount of sensitive information, making them prime targets for hackers. While data theft is certainly a major consequence of these attacks, many often forget that network outages and the ensuing downtime can be just as damaging, if not more.
Networks are the lifeline of a campus, connecting students and teachers to vital resources and devices necessary for everyday educational processes. Should this lifeline get severed, the results can be disastrous.
Research from Comparitech shows that network downtime brought on by ransomware attacks against K12 and higher education institutions globally costs over $53 billion. The US Government Accountability Office reports that the learning loss in the wake of a cyberattack can range from three days to three weeks. In light of these perils, colleges and universities need a network safeguard to ensure educational processes can continue running smoothly, even during a crisis.
What is out-of-band management?
Firewalls and dual authentication are one arm of cybersecurity, and another equally important element is network resiliency, or the ability of the network to maintain normal operations in the face of faults. Unfortunately, many schools do not have resilient networks because they rely on in-band management to manage the network. This method is not only inefficient but also dangerous, as there is no way to reach affected devices and remediate issues during a cyberattack.
Another way schools can manage the network is through out-of-band management. Unlike in-band management, which uses the network to manage the network, out-of-band management allows a school’s IT team to set up a management plane separate and independent from the data plane or production infrastructure.
This separation from the production network provides network engineers with an alternate path to access devices located at remote sites when the network is down without directly accessing the IP production address in the data plane.
Using out-of-band management during a cyberattack
Best-in-class out-of-band management solutions often come with a centralized management platform. These platforms and supporting hardware allow network and IT teams to extend their reach during a network breach and disable access to impacted network equipment via a console port, isolating the incident. A management platform also empowers teams to shut down server access to protect private data until they can remediate the network outage.
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Additionally, network and IT teams can use the out-of-band management platform to disconnect the WAN connection, isolate affected branches and use cellular access to remediate remotely. If they cannot regain control of network assets, they can utilize a power distribution unit to power off remotely. Leading out-of-band management platforms will even permit network and IT teams to reconfigure devices to factory default and rebuild the profiles using the console port.
Additional benefits
Edge devices, like Internet of Things (IoT) devices, are particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks. As these devices continue to increase in prevalence inside classrooms and across campuses, out-of-band management solutions can preemptively recognize network and environmental inconsistencies at the edge and automatically send alerts to the requisite personnel via email or SMS.
This ability to proactively detect and remotely remediate issues at the edge before they snowball into full-blown network outages is critical to protecting educational operations, many of which rely on IoT devices.
Network resilience and efficiency
While network resilience is top of mind for most colleges and universities, this is just one of out-of-band management’s many benefits. Leading solutions can help networking teams automate and streamline provisioning, configuration and monitoring tasks, accelerating time- and resource-intensive processes. To that end, when schools consider investing in out-of-band management, they should also view such an investment as an efficiency multiplier.
