Poof: no more viruses

Abstract

American University's office of Information Technology (IT) deployed Cisco Clean Access (CCA) across the student network in 2005 to combat the continual rise in virus and spyware infections. After two years, there has been a 79% reduction of malware infections reported by our students to the IT Help Desk. Several factors combined to facilitate the tremendous success of this Network Admission Control (NAC) implementation. These factors included: extensive communication with users; requirements selection, which reflected a thorough analysis of requirements to address the greatest areas of risk in the simplest way possible; and development of custom software tools to simplify the process of performing individual updates. After the dramatic reduction in malware infections for the student population, IT is in the process of transitioning all AU staff and faculty to CCA during the spring and summer of 2007. Due to an accelerated timeline for deployment and the unique needs of staff and faculty, IT developed a new transition strategy that leverages AU's existing Novell infrastructure and new features of CCA to create an almost seamless transition for the end user. As CCA is enabled in each department, machines can be silently evaluated to determine if they meet AU's requirements and new applications and patches may be deployed through the use of login scripts. The end result is magic. Therefore, IT is prepared to quickly and painlessly migrate all 3400 staff and faculty to CCA within months.