Sophos defends all schools through ICL
Sophos, a world leader in corporate anti-virus protection, today
announced that it is to protect IT systems in all of Northern
Ireland's schools from virus attack. Sophos will defend the schools
as part of a deal with eBusiness services company, ICL. Under the
terms of the deal, all Northern Irish secondary schools will switch
from their existing anti-virus protection (provided through CLASS -
the Computerisation of Local Administration Systems in Schools) to
that provided by Sophos. All of the region's primary school IT
systems are already protected by Sophos Anti-Virus.
ICL, which has contracts with CLASS to supply all Northern
Ireland schools with maintained IT administration systems, has
purchased an unlimited education user licence from Sophos. This
licence will cover all 240 secondary schools in the region, in
addition to the 650 primary schools with computers already covered.
When the remaining 334 primary schools receive their computer
systems, Sophos will protect all schools in the region - a total of
1,224. Sophos also protects 50% of schools in England and Wales
through ICL and other partners and offers educational licences at
specially reduced rates.
"When people think of the damage viruses do, it's often in the
context of big business," said Mark Forrest, sales director at
Sophos. "However, the implications of a virus infection at a
school, charity or other public service are equally serious. Sophos
is committed to providing the best possible anti-virus protection
at a sensible price."
"Sophos Anti-Virus has an excellent track record in education,"
added Roy Beattie, CLASS Director. "The licence obtained by ICL for
Northern Ireland will offer us a high degree of flexibility and the
potential to use this software in all our schools on both
Administration and Curriculum systems."
About ICL
ICL is one of Europe's leading e-Business services companies and
employs more than 20,000 people in 40 countries. It designs, builds
and operates innovative solutions for customers in the financial
services, telecoms, retail, government, utilities and travel
markets. ICL is wholly owned by Fujitsu Limited, a £31 billion
leader in Internet-based IT solutions for the global marketplace.
ICL is the European-centred arm of Fujitsu's global IT services
strategy.
About ICL in Ireland
ICL employs over 1000 people in Ireland focusing on the three
key strategic business areas of e-Innovation, e-Applications and
e-Infrastructure. The ICL software development operations in
Ireland include Oracle Centres of Excellence in Belfast, Dublin and
Dundalk, the IT Centre in Dublin specialising in eCommerce,
Smartcards and Java, and the Microsoft Solution Centre in Belfast.
In addition, ICL also has several associated companies including
Kainos (CRM and document management) and Synergy Centres
(Multimedia). As well as meeting the needs of ICL's customers in
Ireland these operations also provide services to ICL's customers
internationally.
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.