DynaSis Completes First Phase of Major IT Initiative at Oglethorpe University

Alpharetta, Georgia 2016 – DynaSis, Atlanta’s premier provider of IT services and support for small and midsized businesses (SMBs), recently announced it has completed the first phase of a comprehensive IT planning and upgrade effort for Oglethorpe University. The first major project, begun in late 2015, has provided the institution with redundant firewall capabilities to protect hundreds of servers across a network that has hundreds of thousands of open connections at any given time.

The firewall chosen for the project, a Dell Sonic Wall NSA, is a next-generation appliance that provides consolidated, centralized and advanced filtering, and threat protection, while achieving low latency with a very large number of connections. It represents an important step for Oglethorpe as part of a cohesive plan, developed with the input of DynaSis’s IT experts, to modernize the university’s technology infrastructure and processes.

“DynaSis started with a comprehensive assessment of our core systems, which helped us focus on areas that could make a significant difference for our students, faculty and staff” said Oglethorpe Chief Information Officer Mike Gonsalves. “In August 2015, DynaSis started remote monitoring and maintenance of our servers, which resulted in a more stable and reliable server environment. The benefits have been a 24/7 operation with minimal unplanned downtime as a result. They really do a great job.”

On the horizon for Oglethorpe is a storage area network (SAN) and then a network upgrade after DynaSis completes further analyses. Like most educational institutions, Oglethorpe must pace its upgrades to align with student and faculty needs during the school year, which made systematic prioritization of projects critical to the effort.

“Educational institutions today are under attack, literally, with some of the world’s brightest people trying to gain access to sensitive data” said DynaSis's President of Managed IT Services, Dave Moorman. “Our most pressing concern, after performing a comprehensive situational assessment, was to ensure Oglethorpe had 100% firewall protection—with both a main unit and a high-availability unit that would take over in the event of an outage. Additional upgrades, which will give the university an IT platform to match its world-class reputation, continue to be implemented.”