Catholic Education South Australia adopts F5 Networks technology
Catholic Education South Australia (CESA), the parent body that directs policy development for Catholic schools in South Australia, has created intelligent and agile infrastructure to deliver optimised applications to its stakeholders with telecommunications service provider, F5 Networks’ advanced Application Delivery Controller (ADC).
The extended partnership follows the successful deployment of F5’s BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and Access Policy Manager (APM) modules on its BIG-IP platform, which enabled CESA to scale applications to meet significant demands from schools and students with greater agility.
CESA senior network engineer, Simon Sigré, said the organisation pursued F5’s technologies as it wanted a solution that would provide sophisticated application level protection as it became more application-centric.
“Our biggest challenge early on, as we started delivering more and more applications to schools, was scale. With over 98 schools connected to our wide area network, the aim was no longer how to get the customer to connect fast, it was around how we could serve content and provision new services faster.
“Traditional methods simply didn’t scale and we couldn't keep up. We needed a customisable framework for deploying applications and automating tasks,” he said.
CESA also added BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) to provide application layer security to protect its educational assets, as well as the applications and content being continuously published.
Sigré said the deployment of the module was seamless and allowed CESA to wrap a security layer around all of its services in a way that traditional firewall solutions could not.
“ASM gave us that extra advantage, where we were able to build some high level templates that matched the base technologies in use and then start customising to accommodate the subtle differences of each new service.
“Specifically, ASM allowed us to tailor security profiles to fit like a glove and therefore wrap seamlessly around every application. It also gave us a level of assurance that all our applications are delivered in a secure manner,” he added.
