[school-discuss] A nice article dealing with Internet security with Linux for schools in the Pikes peak area.

School District Gives Linux Security Technology High Grades

By Robert Cox, TechLearning

As any corporate IT administrator knows, network security is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. If your network is not secure, not only do you risk losing valuable corporate information, but you also run the risk of being liable if your network is used to disrupt other sites, as with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. With this in mind, corporations are spending more and more on network security, even while other corporate spending is being curtailed.

The educational sector faces the same security challenges as corporations,but schools often lack the financial resources to deploy robust network security solutions. Even for those schools that do have the financial resources, most lack the technical know-how to implement and manage effective security offerings. A school district typically does not have a dedicated IT staff, and security deployed incorrectly can create as many problems as it solves.

The difficulties facing school districts were made painfully clear to me as a technology consultant when I began working with the Pikes Peak Board of Cooperative Educational Services (Pikes Peak BOCES). A not-for-profit cooperative, Pikes Peak BOCES enables about 22 school districts to pool monies and share a variety of resources, such as special education teachers and systems administrators. Since telecommunications charges for Internet access are astronomical for schools on the high plains and some types of communications lines might not be available, Pikes Peak BOCES acts as a service provider enabling seven rural school districts to connect their local area networks to the Internet via a third-party high-speed network.