Wellington College chooses LogRhythm’s NextGen SIEM Platform to improve threat detection

Wellington College, one of the UK’s leading day and independent boarding schools, has chosen LogRhythm’s NextGen SIEM Platform to boost its cyber security posture.

Located in Berkshire, Wellington College is home to approximately 1,100 students and 600 staff, and is regarded as one of the UK’s most prestigious institutions. In 2017, the College decided it needed to enhance its cyber security portfolio by investing in a tool that would automate the collection, storage and analysis of its data to better identify behavioural trends and have greater insight into potential cyberthreats.

“The College generates a wealth of data, which can be a minefield for our IT department to manage manually,” said Tony Whelton, IT director at Wellington College. “In the past, we have taken more of a reactive approach to security, largely because we have not had full visibility into our network activity. We are constantly battling both external and internal threats; indeed, with a college full of smart, savvy teenagers, the insider threat is very real. As the threat landscape escalated, we knew we needed a more holistic solution that would automatically make sense of our data, essentially acting as the eyes and ears of the IT team.”

Wellington College turned to Xitenys, an independent provider of next generation security and data management solutions, for help in finding the right solution. Following a rigorous tendering process involving a number of other vendors, the College selected LogRhythm’s NextGen SIEM Platform. The platform was chosen for its enhanced functionality, seamless reporting features and advanced analytics capabilities.

“LogRhythm’s NextGen SIEM Platform stood out as being best-in-beed after a year of testing multiple solutions,” continued Whelton. “The visibility we now have is exceptional. Not only do we have access to data that reveals useful behavioural trends, we also have insight into network activity – both internal and external – in real-time, which means we can take action to neutralise a potential threat as soon as it appears.

The NextGen SIEM Platform is also helping Wellington College overcome the challenge of detecting and neutralising threats remotely. 

“At the College, our students and staff are constantly accessing our network on-the-go as they roam the campus, which can make it much more challenging to identify and locate a lot of threats. LogRhythm’s platform is incredibly intelligent and is able to correlate data from multiple sources to reveal what is infected, where and when. For example, we are now able to merge data picked up from our firewall with WiFi data to get the exact location of a malware-infected device. What’s also really useful is that this data is analysed and stored on one single dashboard, making it much easier for our IT department to create and share reports,” concluded Whelton.

LogRhythm’s NextGen SIEM Platform combines user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA), network traffic and behaviour analytics (NTBA) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) in a single end-to-end solution. LogRhythm’s Threat Lifecycle Management (TLM) framework serves as the foundation for the AI-enabled security operations centre (SOC), helping customers measurably secure their cloud, physical and virtual infrastructures for both IT and OT environments.

“We’re are extremely pleased that Wellington College has chosen our NextGen SIEM platform,” said Martin Landless, Sales Director, UK & Ireland, LogRhythm. “The threat landscape is evolving rapidly and institutions such as Wellington College are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to detect and mitigate threats manually. Our NextGen SIEM Platform is enabling the College’s IT team to rely less on manual threat hunting by automating detection and response, giving them the ability to neutralise threats before any damage has been done. We look forward to continuing our relationship with Wellington College.”