From Ransomware Attacks to Student Safety with Saasyan Assure

Background

The Southport School (TSS) is an Anglican K-12 school for boys located on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. Established in 1901, TSS offers a boy specific curriculum to more than 1,700 students, including over 300 boarders across two campuses. The school has long been a pioneer in using technology to improve learning outcomes and teaching productivity, including a bring your own device (BYOD) model that gives students direct access to school resources and the internet.

Central to the school's educational philosophy is the TSS Diligence Scale, a framework that identifies specific behaviours linked to academic success. The responsible use of technology is one of five criteria within that scale, making visibility into how students engage online not just a welfare concern but a core part of the school's pedagogical approach.

Problem

The scale of internet consumption at TSS was significant, with staff and students generating many terabytes of data across the school's dual internet connections every day. That volume of traffic brought with it serious security exposure, and the school had been targeted on multiple occasions by ransomware attacks. It became clear that the existing infrastructure was not equipped to handle either the scale of network demand or the sophistication of the threats the school was facing.

Beyond cybersecurity, the school lacked the reporting capability needed to translate raw internet data into something actionable for teachers, wellbeing staff, and school leaders. The IT team was burdened with manually extracting and preparing reports, which slowed down the school's ability to identify and respond to student welfare concerns. What was needed was a system that non technical staff could use independently, with drill down capability to examine internet usage at the individual student level and the ability to support the evidence based coaching that the TSS Diligence Scale required.

Solution

TSS deployed two enterprise grade next generation firewalls from Palo Alto Networks, one at each campus, connected to separate internet providers in an active/active high availability configuration. This gave the school the resilience and throughput capacity needed to support more than 2,000 staff and students while providing a scalable foundation as network demands continue to grow.

On top of that infrastructure, TSS deployed Saasyan Assure. As a Palo Alto Networks NextWave Technology Partner, Saasyan integrates directly with the firewalls, securely analysing the data they generate without requiring any additional on site infrastructure. Key capabilities of Saasyan Assure included:

• AI powered wellbeing alerts. Assure uses an artificial intelligence system that continuously learns from search terms and online behaviour patterns to automatically identify new phrases and activity that warrant alerting. Teachers and wellbeing staff receive immediate notifications when students attempt to access dangerous or inappropriate content, including indicators related to cyberbullying, self harm, grooming, and threats of violence.

• Granular internet usage dashboards. The management dashboard gives staff visibility across the whole school, by year group, or drilled down to individual students, enabling evidence based conversations about online behaviour and direct application of the TSS Diligence Scale.

• Self service reporting. All staff, including teachers, leaders, and the wellbeing team, can generate and schedule their own reports without involving IT, drawing on the same rich data set that the Palo Alto Networks firewalls produce.

• Cyberbullying prevention. The ability to review and compare internet usage across year groups and for specific students has given staff a practical and evidence backed tool to identify and intervene in cyberbullying situations.

Outcomes