The Kemnal Academies Trust Ensures Uninterrupted Education and Data Protection with Action1

As one of the largest trusts in the South and East of England, The Kemnal Academies Trust (TKAT) serves 23,000 students across five regions. With a mission to provide high-quality education for every child, TKAT prioritizes safeguarding and promoting the welfare of its pupils and staff. This includes a strong commitment to online safety, protecting personal data from malware attacks, and ensuring uninterrupted learning experiences.

Faced with a rapidly growing cyber threat landscape and a surge in ransomware attacks targeting educational organizations, the IT department at TKAT made security and vulnerability remediation one of its top priorities. “As an education establishment, we must protect both student and employee data, mitigating the risks of ransomware and virus attacks while preventing potential regulatory penalties,” says Daniel Sapseid, IT Security and Compliance Lead at TKAT.

However, the IT team’s previous approach to managing security updates was unreliable and inefficient. Daniel and his colleagues relied on WSUS to manage operating system (OS) patches, which required significant manual effort and lacked the scalability to cover 6,300 endpoints across 45 schools in different regions.

Additionally, the IT team had no efficient solution for managing updates to third-party applications. Updates were pushed manually, primarily through Microsoft Group Policy, which was time-consuming, offered minimal visibility, and led to inconsistencies in the patching routine. This approach burdened the small IT team and heightened the risk of cyber threats due to missed or delayed updates. “Our internal security scans revealed multiple instances of outdated software, underscoring the need for a robust patch management solution to address vulnerabilities in third-party applications,” explains Daniel.

Due to the lack of comprehensive patching solutions, the TKAT IT team struggled to ensure a safe and seamless environment for its community—a cornerstone of the Trust’s vision. Recognizing this gap, the team sought a solution with advanced automation capabilities to streamline updates for both OS and third-party applications, crucial for improving security, boosting productivity, and achieving compliance with cybersecurity standards.

Daniel and his colleague decided to test Action1 and were impressed by its simplicity. “Action1 is incredibly easy to use. Even a non-technical person could manage it — that’s how simple the platform is,” says Daniel. He also appreciated the platform’s robust patching automation capabilities, real-time visibility into vulnerabilities, and cloud-native architecture, which enables seamless patch deployment across thousands of distributed endpoints.

Action1 enabled the IT team at TKAT to immediately gain real-time visibility into their IT environment after deploying the solution. After splitting the endpoints into six organizations based on their region, the team could detect over 5,000 vulnerabilities per region, primarily caused by outdated or unpatched third-party applications. “Once we rolled out Action1, we found some software that was 10 to 12 versions behind the latest, such as Adobe Flash Player,” adds Daniel.

Thanks to Action1, Daniel and the team promptly remediated detected vulnerabilities by installing the updated versions of applications in just a few clicks. After eliminating this security gap, they set up automation policies to streamline the entire patching cycle for both OS and third-party applications, ensuring timely deployment of critical security updates. TKAT now benefits from Action1’s Software Repository, which helps automate patch deployment for various applications essential for the education process, including Adobe, VLC, Google Chrome, Google Drive, Zoom, OneDrive, Java, and more.

With Action1’s advanced automation capabilities, Daniel and the team adopted a proactive approach to mitigating the risks of potential vulnerability exploits, protecting personal data, and securing the IT environment against cyber threats. Additionally, the platform helps the team ensure compliance with Department for Education (DfE) guidelines, which include recommendations to implement a third-party patching solution. It also enables the team to prepare for the Cyber Essentials certification process.

Thanks to Action1, the TKAT IT team not only enhanced the security of their IT environment but also significantly boosted IT productivity. With the platform’s advanced automation, intuitive UI, cloud-native architecture, and P2P software distribution technology, Daniel and his colleagues now manage updates across all 45 academies in just a few clicks, saving hours of work weekly. Previously, the team spent over 18 hours manually patching endpoints across all schools. Today, with Action1, they simply configure a few automation and customization rules, reducing the entire patching process to under 25 minutes—a remarkable 45x improvement in efficiency.

In addition, the IT team leveraged Action1’s extensive reporting capabilities to gain valuable insights beyond patching. For instance, the platform revealed that 3,000 devices were left online over the weekend, resulting in excess environmental and financial costs. With this discovery in hand, the IT team implemented a process to power down all machines every night, significantly reducing weekly operational expenses.

With Action1, TKAT proactively addresses the evolving landscape of security threats, ensuring a safe and seamless digital experience for every child and employee. This transformation enhances security and the learning process while fostering trust and confidence in the community.