New Alliance Pairs SunGard K-12 Education and Impulse Point to Support...

The Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) trend that has challenged U.S. businesses and universities has reached K-12 schools. As increasing numbers of teachers and students access educational resources via their own laptop, tablet, and smartphone, network security is of growing concern to school districts. A new alliance between SunGard K-12 Education, a leading provider of K-12 software, and Impulse Point, a respected provider of network access security solutions, is offering districts peace-of-mind.

SunGard K-12 Education provides anytime, anywhere access to critical student information through its PLUS 360 suite of products. Now serving more than 8 million students nationwide, the software and technology services company is collaborating with Impulse Point to address a growing concern of its customers regarding the identity and security of mobile devices accessing district information technology resources.

“Today’s K-12 learning environment is being dramatically changed by the increasing ubiquity of advanced technology. More and more, our clients are seeking a solution that will enable them to manage personally-owned devices while maintaining security across their computer network,” says Jay Reed, senior product manager for SunGard K-12 Education. “Impulse Point’s Safe•Connect was specifically designed to allow school districts to cost-effectively address the needs of large-scale, distributed environments.”

Safe•Connect identifies mobile devices and helps ensure that only authorized users are allowed access to network resources. Additionally Safe•Connect can automate the process by which devices are placed onto a secure wireless (WPA2) network and enforces security policies in real-time. The product is one of the most scalable solutions available for controlling network access and offers an easy-to-implement and support endpoint policy management solution. It seamlessly connects into a district’s existing network infrastructure and provides the flexibility to adhere to each school district’s unique computing policy philosophies.

Impulse Point Vice President Brian Herzig welcomes the alliance with SunGard K-12 Education. “Availability to secure computing resources is a key to fueling today’s K-12 learning environment. Since 2004, Safe•Connect has been the solution of choice for managing student personal devices within the education sector,” he says. “Through this alliance, we will offer SunGard K-12 Education’s customers a proven solution that delivers industry-leading ease-of-deployment and management to help meet their evolving BYOD needs.”

About SunGard K-12 Education
SunGard K-12 Education offers software solutions designed to help teachers, administrators, and parents support student achievement. The company’s PLUS 360 products are a single integrated suite of software solutions for the management of student information, assessment and curriculum, special education, and financial and human resources. The suite—which provides anytime, anywhere access to important student information—can be deployed to work together to help meet educational goals and requirements or implemented as stand-alone systems. For more information, visit SunGard K-12 Education at sungard.com/K12.

About SunGard
SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and technology services companies. SunGard has more than 17,000 employees and serves approximately 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries. SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, education, and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services, and business continuity management software. With annual revenue of about $4.5 billion, SunGard is the largest privately held software and services company and is ranked 480 on the Fortune 500. For more information, please visit http://www.sungard.com.

About Impulse Point
Impulse Point delivers the industry’s most scalable and easiest to deploy and maintain Network Access Control (NAC) solution. Safe•Connect is the BYOD solution of choice for large, diverse environments—such as Education—where the “Consumerization of IT” is driving the need to provide endpoint security policy enforcement for a myriad of personally-owned, non-managed, mobile computing devices. Deployed and supported as a managed service, Safe•Connect’s rapid installation, network independence, and track record of reducing help desk calls results in lower total cost of ownership and reduced risk. Customers currently entrust the security of more than three million endpoints to Impulse Point. Visit http://www.impulse.com.

Trademark Information: SunGard, the SunGard logo, and PLUS 360 are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Impulse Point and Safe•Connect are trademarks or registered trademarks of Impulse Point, LLC. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

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