Higher education technology provider Jisc has signed a contract to provide its DDoS mitigation service to its Irish equivalent HEANet.
The not-for-profit organisation, which is owned by universities and colleges, has signed a 12-month rolling contract with the national education and research network for Ireland. Under the deal it will provide the service to protect Irish universities, colleges and schools from distributed denial of service attacks.
It said the arrangement has its roots in a longstanding collaborative relationship between the two organisations.
Jisc’s chief executive officer Paul Feldman (pictured) said: “Our research shows that DDoS attacks are increasing against the UK education sector and are rightly considered by our university and college members to be one of the top five security threats. That’s why we take DDoS protection so seriously.
“We are delighted to be able to use our knowledge and expertise to help protect Irish organisations, too, and look forward to a continuing partnership.”
His counterpart at HEANet, Kerrie Power, said:” DDoS attacks represent a serious and evolving threat to our Irish education and research community. HEAnet is committed to ensuring we have the right tools in place to minimise that threat, and the addition of Jisc’s DDoS service will significantly enhance our security services portfolio.”
Jisc has been flagging up its cyber security credentials over the past few days: earlier this week it announced that it is managing an exercise in which universities cyber attack each other to identify vulnerabilities.
