Warwick firm helps alleviate colleges' IT congestion

College campuses have long been a petri dish for computer viruses and other forms of malware. That usually results in huge headaches for university IT departments and sleepless nights for administrators confronted with spiraling technology costs related to network security.

However, a company in Warwick, Atrion Networking, has developed an outsourcing solution tailored to educational computing that provides an effective means for countering the shenanigans of digital miscreants, as well as stabilize IT spending.

Recently, Providence Business News spoke with Paul Cronin, Atrion’s vice president of customer services, about the company’s offering to the educational market.


PBN: Are there certain times of the year when educational institutions are more susceptible to malware than others?

CRONIN: Every time students go back to a college or university – whether it be in the fall or returning from the winter semester break – there appears to be a lot of difficulty in trying to balance the return of the students with their environment, with the impact on their networks. It’s gotten very complicated because of the amount of spyware, viruses and congestion on the network. Because of those problems, it has required colleges and universities to invest very heavily in a lot of the tools and technology to guarantee success and mitigate the chance of viruses and congestion on the network.

Congestion can impact a college’s ability to function as a business with administrative requirements, e-business requirements and academic requirements to use technology in the classrooms and in distance learning. It goes beyond students being impacted. Now the college is being impacted as an organization and a business.


PBN: Why are schools more vulnerable when students return from a break?

CRONIN: A lot of the colleges and universities today do not mandate that students have software that mitigates viruses and spyware. So a student goes home and brings back a computer from who knows where without the software that helps protect it against the latest virus or spyware outbreaks.


PBN: Your solution to this problem is to create two networks – one operated by the school for its administrative and academic functions, and another operated by Atrion for the students. What are the advantages of that setup?

CRONIN: Today, a lot of colleges and universities spend a lot of money investing in new technology to keep their network running as a whole – to be able to handle the students’ problems as well as their administrative and academic ones. A major investment needs to be made every year to keep up with those requirements. If you don’t make that investment, you’ll put your business as well as the students at risk. What we do is separate the two networks so even if there’s the worst kind of outbreak on the student network, it won’t impact the administrative network.

We also let students connect to their network at their own risk. We give them a connection in their residence that’s as if they were in their own home or apartment. They’re given segmented connections so they won’t be able to infect other users. By segmenting them off, we’re saying to them that if you don’t have anti-virus software on your machine or you’re not getting Microsoft security updates, there’s going to be a problem, but it’s going to be to you and nobody else.

So what we’ve done is eliminate problems due to resident use or misuse on the administrative network. We’ve separated the impact of any one user having an effect on another user. And we can come in and put in the equipment as part of the solution. That gives the college an opportunity to get a technology refresh that’s supported by us and paid for by the college and university monthly over a fixed time period. What’s nice about that is they can budget effectively for what their costs will be for IT.


PBN: How do you price the service?

CRONIN: It’s presented as a fixed cost for three years based on 10 months per year paid on an annual basis. It can be as low as $20 per month per student to as high as $35.


PBN: How do you control congestion on the student network?

CRONIN: We guarantee every user will have a minimal amount of bandwidth. If that bandwidth is not being used, others can use more. What we didn’t want to have happen is have the good student studying on the Internet suffer because of activities like PC gaming.


PBN: Have any schools asked you to monitor or control music downloads using file-sharing software?

CRONIN: No, they haven’t. We do use a packet shaper that allows us to block or restrict certain applications. It is constantly looking at the types of things being requested from the Web and assigning priorities to them. We have given traffic from certain sites and certain types of data very low priority.


John Mello is a freelance writer who writes on business and technology for a variety of publications from his home in Woonsocket. He can be reached at jpmello@cox.net.