GOAL High School is the largest high school in Colorado, with over 6,000 students, and is also the premier model for online education. GOAL combines online learning programs with in-person support at over forty student drop-in centers statewide and partners with Microsoft and Lenovo to supply cutting-edge technology.
The Story
Manage a Hybrid Approach to Education
As a multi-district online charter school, GOAL High School supplies devices to each of its students across the state of Colorado for the school year. After previously using Chromebooks and making the switch to Windows devices, GOAL High School needed to find an asset management solution that would allow its IT team to be able to track, manage, and freeze its over 6,000 device fleet if necessary. After receiving recommendations from their supplier, GOAL High School decided Absolute Secure Endpoint would be the best solution for this challenge.
Security Challenges
Guarantees
Uninterrupted Visibility
10% Loss
Rate Reduction
Resilient Endpoints
and Applications
"Absolute has done everything we wanted it to do and adding on new features has helped us move forward. It’s really good."
DAN HINTON
TECHNOLOGY SPECIALIST
GOAL HIGH SCHOOL
The Solutions
How They Did It
Take Control of a 6,000+ Device Fleet
With Absolute Secure Endpoint, GOAL High School now has complete visibility across its device fleet, whether on or off the drop-in centers’ network. With the ability to track its entire device fleet, GOAL High School has been able to locate devices and students. This functionality provides staff and parents the peace of mind that both students and devices will remain safe.
Ensure At-Risk Devices and Data Remain Protected
Even in situations when devices show up in various countries around the world, GOAL High School has peace of mind that their data is safe because of Absolute’s ability to remotely freeze at-risk devices. Dan Hinton, Technology Specialist for GOAL High School, shares that they’ve been notified that stolen devices have been formatted; however, with Absolute’s remote freeze capability, these at-risk devices remain inaccessible and protected.
Reduce Endpoint Loss Rate by About 50%
With remote freezing capabilities, GOAL High School can make all devices inaccessible that are not returned by July 1st of every school year. “We found out that we get a lot more computers back when they don’t work, it’s amazing,” says Hinton. GOAL High School will freeze on average 400-500 computers every summer and will get back about 50-60 percent of those devices; then, over the next school year, they’ll receive about 20-30 percent more devices. GOAL High School used to have a device loss rate of around 15% but since implementing Absolute Secure Endpoint, that loss rate is now down to 5%. “Cutting the loss rate of computers in half saves a lot of money,” adds Hinton.
The Results
Make Devices and Key Applications Resilient in the Remote Learning Era
GOAL High School continues to expand its Absolute Secure Endpoint usage, recently leveraging Absolute Application Resilience to monitor some of its key applications’ health and behavior. Now, with Absolute Secure Endpoint, GOAL High School can ensure their endpoints, applications, and students remain safe.
For the GOAL High School team, Absolute Secure Endpoint:
- Provides the ability to remotely freeze at-risk devices
- Cuts device loss from 15% to 5%, providing major cost-savings
- Tracks and locates missing devices, on or off the drop-in centers’ network
- Monitors mission-critical applications behavior
- Guarantees visibility across the entire device fleet
Absolute Platform FAQ
The Absolute® Platform leverages a cloud-based, highly-available and secure multi-tenant architecture that is available across different regions. It’s comprised of a variety of foundational components that power Absolute product features that are being leveraged by the company’s enterprise customers and ecosystems partners (e.g., independent software vendors, original equipment manufacturers, or managed service providers) alike.
The Absolute Platform consists of three core components:
- Absolute Persistence Technology
Absolute Persistence® technology, a unique, patented technology is already embedded in over 600 million devices as a result of Absolute’s partnership with nearly 30 system manufacturers from around the world. Once activated, this technology is fiercely resilient and is the only solution to survive attempts to disable it, even if the device is re-imaged, the hard drive is replaced, or the firmware is updated.
No other technology can do this. Ultimately, it provides a secure, unbreakable, and always-on connection between the Absolute Platform and the endpoint, allowing you to gain unprecedented real-time visibility, control, and remediation capabilities.
- Absolute Resilience Technology
The Absolute Platform utilizes two types of patented Absolute Resilience™ technology to ensure that mission-critical applications remain healthy and operational and to provide end users with the most productive, as well as optimized remote access experience possible:
- Application Resilience™: Monitors mission-critical applications’ health and behavior; detects if missing, corrupted, or not running; and automatically repairs or re-installs components when necessary – without requiring human intervention. Application Resilience ensures security controls are working as expected and provides optimal user experience by fixing unhealthy applications. Currently more than 60 mission-critical applications are enabled for Application Resilience and more are being added frequently.
- Network Resilience™: Monitors and automatically, as well as transparently restores and optimizes unhealthy network connections so networked applications continue to operate without end user-impacting interruptions that would otherwise require manual application restarts, network re-connects, and/or re-authentications. Network Resilience allows for superior connectivity and reliability, allowing end users to focus on their tasks and not network behavior.
- Absolute Intelligence
Absolute ensures a digital tether to each device remains intact, providing you with reliable insights and intelligence from all of your endpoints to the network edge — on or off your corporate network.
Hundreds of data points are gathered and served up as insights, providing guidance on utilization, health, security and compliance posture, as well as a unified view into the entire end user experience. Applying AI-based risk assessment and user entity behavior analytics lets you go beyond the monitoring of resources and applications, allowing for automated remediation and uncompromised user productivity.
Other foundational components of the Absolute Platform that enable the Absolute Secure Endpoint™ and Secure Access™ products are as follows:
- Web console
- Mobile app
- Rules and policy engine
- Alerts
- Dashboards
- APIs
- Application Persistence-as-a-Service SDK
- Third-party integrations (e.g., SIEM, ITSM)
Customers can leverage the Absolute Platform components through Absolute’s packaged products, APIs, and SDKs. The result will be rapid innovation. The Absolute Platform is always included in the product package of choice.
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