American University in Cairo Takes a Hybrid Approach to Distance Learning

The Customer

American University in Cairo (AUC) is a leading English-language, American-accredited institution of higher education and center of intellectual, social and cultural life of the Arab world. Founded in 1919 and centrally located in Cairo, Egypt, AUC was established with innovation and research at its core. AUC offers 36 undergraduate, 44 master’s and two PhD programs rooted in a liberal arts education that encourages students to think critically and find creative solutions to conflicts and challenges facing both the region and the world. The university’s educational assets include a technologically advanced and environmentally sensitive, 260-acre New Cairo campus, the largest English-language academic library collection in Egypt, three modern theaters and 15 cross-disciplinary research centers.

Khaled Mahmoud, AUC Senior Director of University Technology Infrastructure (UTI) is responsible for managing and protecting AUC’s rapidly evolving network and securing AUC’s three global campus locations and offices, more than 6,000 students and 1,500 faculty and staff and their data and devices online wherever they live.

The Challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensely accelerated the digital transformation of higher education institutions around the globe. AUC needed to immediately move all classes online and to enable all users to work and learn remotely for the foreseeable future. The university also looked to enhance its cybersecurity by securing connectivity across the entire AUC network. The AUC IT team identified operational efficiency, improved ROI, network reliability and scalability as key priorities.

The Solution: Distance Learning and Remote Workforce Endpoint Protection

The AUC IT team is now able to leverage the cloud to detect more threats while tightly integrating with the on-premises ecosystem. Infoblox’s BloxOne Threat Defense Advanced is a unique hybrid model that provides resiliency and redundancy not available in cloud-only solutions. As a result, AUC can automatically secure every connection across the AUC network and thus protect its newly remote students and workforce wherever they are.

Furthermore, integrating AUC’s entire security ecosystem has helped the IT team improve incident response, threat intelligence and operational efficiency. By automating and centrally managing all core network services, tools and applications from a single console, the team can focus on priority tasks and automatically respond to priority events and potential malicious incidents with a full set of threat intelligence APIs.

Mahmoud explains, “Like many other universities around the globe in these uncertain times, ours needed to fully transition to online learning. We knew that increasing our online footprint on such a large scale would cause cybersecurity issues to arise. We saw great value in Infoblox’s hybrid solution for managing our new remote work setup. We especially like the lookalike domain threat detection feature that helps our team immediately detect and stop lookalike domain threats before they happen.”

Delivering a Superior Customer Experience

AUC thoroughly researched competing vendors before choosing Infoblox. Mahmoud concludes, “We switched to Infoblox because it is a very well-managed solution that provides better application availability and a simpler user experience. Working with Infoblox has been a highly collaborative and engaging process. The Infoblox team has worked closely with us throughout the entire implementation process and is setting our team up for success.”

For More Information

Learn more about how you can proactively detect malware and protect your users and data via DNS. Speak with an Infoblox representative or start your free trial of our BloxOne Threat Defense technology today.