Connectivity has never been more essential to the mission of the City School District of Albany. Its goal—to provide an education that empowers students to achieve their full potential—is especially challenging given its expansive education network. Spread out over 21 square miles and 34 buildings, the network serves more than 10,000 students, 2,000 educators and staff, as well as a small, but nimble support team of just 11 people. At an unprecedented time of changing classroom practices, the district most notably includes a specialized program that supports refugees in need of services, with English as a new language and where connection, in essence, is everything.
At a glance.
Company Name
City School District of Albany
Industry Size
10,000 students
2,000 staff members
34 buildings
Location
Albany, New York
The need.
- Increase bandwidth capabilities.
- Improve network reliability to reduce the negative impacts on students' ability to learn and administrators to operate.
- Mitigate regular DDoS attacks that frequently made their network unavailable.
The solution.
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Our Ethernet and Dark Fiber services gave them a faster, more reliable way to connect sites within their network.
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DDoS Defense was added to their internet services to protect their network from attacks.
- We upgraded their internet bandwidth from 1.25Gbps to 5Gbps.
- The district gained flexibility to increase bandwidth in the future without further construction and maintained costs at predictable levels.
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Our solution also includes a ring network design that makes the network more resilient against outages.
John Wyld Technology CoordinatorThere hasn’t been a time when we’ve asked for assistance and haven’t gotten all the support we needed and more.
The impact.
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The district has been able to adopt more cloud-based applications—a critical shift as the pandemic prompted remote and hybrid learning.
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DDoS Defense has shielded the city school district at least five times from potentially debilitating cyber attacks since its implementation, preventing any impact on instruction or operations.
- The district was well-prepared as they undertook an $80M renovation and a new building construction for a high school that required a new, dedicated data center.
- A network that is equipped for new bandwidth and data requirements to bring 900 new instructional spaces online.
Let’s talk about your connectivity needs.
Your business is unique—and so are your connectivity needs. With an individualized approach, we’ll show you how our infrastructure solutions will serve you today and prepare you for tomorrow.