Founded in 1898, the Anaheim Union High School District is a partnership of students, parents, faculty, and staff that serves the educational needs of families in Anaheim, California, and surrounding cities. One of the largest school districts in the state, Anaheim Union’s student population is just shy of 30,000 on 21 different junior high and high school campuses stretched across five cities. The school is also the City of Anaheim’s third largest employer, with over 3,000 faculty and staff.
The Story
How Anaheim Union Took Learning Online
Computers and technology have been a part of Anaheim Union High School District’s college and career-readiness strategy for some time. Even though equipping almost 30,000 students with digital devices is a large investment, the plan came to fruition when a global pandemic forced everyone to stay home.
When COVID hit, schools were forced to shut down as a precaution and their learning modules were flipped upside down. At the same time, a new problem emerged: equipping students with the tools they needed to be able to thrive in a remote learning environment. This is where Absolute Secure Endpoint came in to help.
Security Needs
Device Tracking
Accuracy
Total Fleet
Visibility
Secure
Remote Learning
"Absolute Secure Endpoint was so effective, we now use it on all our devices."
ERIK GREENWOOD
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
ANAHEIM UNION HIGH SCHOOL DISTRICT
The Solutions
How They Did It
Protecting Technology Investments
Technology has long been a part of the district’s vision to graduate college and career-ready students but equipping almost 30,000 of them with digital devices was a sizable investment —particularly 20 years ago. Erik Greenwood has been Chief Technology Officer at Anaheim Union for the past 16 years. He and his team have used the Absolute Resilience solution from the beginning to protect that investment.
Securing Remote Learning Environments
Historically, devices didn’t go home with students. There were very few exceptions; devices remained at school and in charging carts while not in classroom use. But when the COVID-19 outbreak hit, the district had to transition to a fully remote learning environment.
As students were being dismissed for remote learning, Greenwood and his team were formulating a plan for getting technology into the hands of those who didn’t have access to it at home. After a district-wide survey, they had to quickly configure 7,000 Chromebooks and 2,000 mobile hotspots to distribute to needy families. Each device had Absolute Resilience turned on, so Anaheim Union IT could track the ones being checked out, even after they left the school network, with an always-on digital tether, allowing for a two-way connection.
From Loss Prevention to Learning Outcomes
Tracking how many students the district was serving with technology and the details of which student got what device across a large fleet became the new normal for Anaheim Union. While Anaheim Union’s original intent in using Absolute Resilience was as a theft deterrent, they rely on the solution for so much more today. Comprehensive fleet visibility and control allow them to best leverage the assets they already have and respond to student needs in a timely way as they arise.
The Results
Supporting Remote, Hybrid, or In-Person Learning Without Sacrificing Security
Because the future of learning remains somewhat in flux, Anaheim Union has focused on honing the mechanics of a few different learning models—in-person, fully virtual, or a hybrid approach. With the capabilities Absolute is delivering, the district is much more prepared to roll out whatever model makes the most sense at the time.
For Anaheim Union High School District, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Tracks devices being checked out, even after they leave the school network, with an always-on digital tether that allows for a two-way connection
- Allows the school district to support remote learning without sacrificing security
- Provides visibility into asset inventory, allowing the district to ensure it is best meeting its students’ needs
Absolute Platform FAQ
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.
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