This post was originally published here by Jennifer Perisho.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tom Murphy, the CISO of Northwestern University – a Bitglass customer. After corresponding for a few months, hoping he would meet with us to make a customer testimonial video, it finally happened! Like most interviews, it took us a few minutes to set up, but, once the interview started, he was unstoppable!
For anyone unfamiliar with it, Northwestern University, based in Illinois, is one of the country’s leading research and academic institutions with twelve colleges across three campuses, 20,000 students, and 3,000 faculty members (that’s a lot of data).
So, what data does a university like Northwestern need to protect? A lot, as it turns out. There is a need to secure student, faculty, and alumni personally identifiable information (PII). As a research university, Northwestern also needs to protect intellectual property, which can be a big revenue generator for such an institution. Northwestern also runs a medical school, so protected health information (PHI) must be secured according to HIPAA. Throw in credit card processing for fees and tuition payments and a large university looks like a combination of just about every regulated and security-conscious industry out there!
To meet its data protection needs, the university was looking to prevent data loss and control access to cloud apps such as Box and Office 365. Only Bitglass’ cloud access security broker (CASB) solution was able to provide Northwestern with agentless real-time data protection. So far, Northwestern University and Bitglass have been an unstoppable team as you will see in the video.
All in all, it was a great day of filming with Tom (he really was a natural), and learning more about Northwestern and its use of Bitglass. Want to hear more? Check out the video here.
Photo:Boch Systems
