QDoE has a well-established reputation for its zero-tolerance approach to child safety
The Queensland Department of Education (QDoE) provides education services to more than 580,000 students across 1,258 schools in the state. It also employs more than 78,000 people in teaching and corporate roles.
QDoE has a well-established reputation for its zero-tolerance approach to child safety. It prioritises protecting students and staff by securing the information and systems that underpin their modern learning technologies. However, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly changed the department’s cybersecurity threat landscape, as many more students and staff members switched to learning and working from home.
“We’ve had to adapt accordingly,” says Chris Whiting, Cyber Defence Manager at QDoE. “We brought on a lot of Microsoft Azure services to support the students and the staff using Microsoft Office 365 and moved our authentication mechanisms around in that space as well, to accommodate that ever-changing platform.”
As the school year was coming to an end in late 2021, so too was QDoE’s endpoint security contract. The department had been with the same provider for 15 years and began looking for an alternative solution that offered better endpoint protection for its 257,000 shared devices and 14,000 servers across the state.
The Queensland Department of Education (QDoE) provides education services to more than 580,000 students across 1,258 schools in the state. It also employs more than 78,000 people in teaching and corporate roles.
QDoE has a well-established reputation for its zero-tolerance approach to child safety. It prioritises protecting students and staff by securing the information and systems that underpin their modern learning technologies. However, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly changed the department’s cybersecurity threat landscape, as many more students and staff members switched to learning and working from home.
“We’ve had to adapt accordingly,” says Chris Whiting, Cyber Defence Manager at QDoE. “We brought on a lot of Microsoft Azure services to support the students and the staff using Microsoft Office 365 and moved our authentication mechanisms around in that space as well, to accommodate that ever-changing platform.”
As the school year was coming to an end in late 2021, so too was QDoE’s endpoint security contract. The department had been with the same provider for 15 years and began looking for an alternative solution that offered better endpoint protection for its 257,000 shared devices and 14,000 servers across the state.
Rich insights help shape cybersecurity strategy
Among the benefits QDoE has gained from deploying Defender for Endpoint is a higher level of cybersecurity intelligence.
“Microsoft’s Defender for Endpoint offers in-built protection for our operating systems and increases our visibility through telemetry reporting,” says Chris Fowler, Platform Development Manager at QDoE. “This allows for quicker identification of threats and trends, as well as mitigation.”
Whiting agrees, saying: “The amount of information we are receiving on threat and incident management is extremely rich. It’s an extensive expansion of our security information and event management [SIEM] and the intelligence we were getting from our previous standalone antivirus information.
“Unfortunately, we are a small team in the cybersecurity space, so eyes on glass is always an issue.
Whiting adds the “invaluable” insights that Defender for Endpoint provides will also help QDoE leverage Azure to implement a Zero Trust cybersecurity model.
“We are looking at leveraging that in the very near future so we can maintain our end-user experience and consistently make applications available [to students and staff] as we move to Zero Trust over the next five to 10 years,” he says.
