Customer Story: Clifton High School

Clifton High School was an early Fresh Security customer. In this customer story, James Webber explains how the school uses Fresh Security. As curriculum lead for digital learning, he describes the school's initial objectives. And how the school adapted to remote working in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Visibility of Data Breaches Is Clearer and Responding Is Quicker With Fresh Security

Clifton High School is a co-educational independent school based in Bristol, UK. It's the only school in the area to operate the Diamond Edge model of education. As a school, the need to embrace and use technology has never been greater. But providing technology to students and teachers exposes the school to increased cyberattacks.

As a school, we have considerable experience in how to use technology to benefit our students' education and staff members. Yet when it comes to cybersecurity, we have limited expertise, skills, and even less time to keep up with the latest attacks facing our school. But we recognise the need to protect our students, staff members, and the reputation of the school.

The challenge we faced

Many of the cybersecurity solutions we tested before choosing Fresh Security were:

• Complicated to deploy and manage
• Required high levels of experience to operate and many configuration changes to work in our network
• Often had a premium price that was not viable for the school to purchase

What we were trying to achieve

By finding the right solution, we knew Clifton High School would be able to:

• Give our students access to the latest technologies and cloud services to help their studies
• Give our staff members more technology options to create the best learning experience within the school
• Rollout new services more quickly and confidently
• Use our time more effectively to deliver new tools and services
• Use our budget on learning outcomes and not on the cost of cybersecurity

Our first impressions of Fresh Security

During our research, Clifton High School was introduced to Fresh Security. Within minutes we had a list of accounts that were highly visible to cybercriminals. And a list of students and staff members who had already lost passwords and sensitive data.

We were surprised by how simple it was to work with Fresh Security. Especially the remarkably simple way to start using the product.

How has Fresh Security benefitted Clifton High School?

Clifton High School has reduced the time, budget, and effort needed to secure our systems by using Fresh Security.

Most significantly, our technicians do not need to check more than 600 accounts on our system. Fresh Security does that automatically and alerts us to issues as they happen.

Fresh Security provides a simple and powerful interface that allows us to educate our staff with precise data. And the real-time data means we can respond to potential security breaches.

At Clifton High School, we recognise that the likelihood of cybercriminals targeting the school increases as we deploy more technology and cloud services. This is particularly important in our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many, we implemented remote working solutions to continue to teach our students in these challenging times.

As standard, Fresh Security automatically discovers highly visible accounts. But in our response to COVID-19, we added more 'private' accounts to Fresh Security. This allowed us to track more accounts for data breaches and gives us even more visibility.

Fresh Security’s simple approach allows our staff to focus on our students. And remain confident the increased cybersecurity threat is being tracked and managed.

Fresh Security is a trusted advisor to Clifton High School. The simple and easy-to-use solutions assure the school they will be protected against cyber breaches. Our partnership will continue to grow and provide visibility of staff member and student cybersecurity risks.

James Webber, Clifton High School