What Can Schools Expect When Choosing Heimdal?

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This piece is authored by Michael Coffer, Heimdal’s resident sales expert for the education sector. Michael speaks to hundreds of IT admins a year, so there are few people who understand the challenges of this sector better than him. Here, he explains what to expect when you get on the phone with a Heimdal sales representative.

When IT admins in the education sector first get on the phone with me, I often sense a fair amount of apprehension. Don’t worry, I get it: Your job isn’t easy, and chatting with sales reps isn’t many people’s idea of a good time.

But perhaps more importantly, being an IT admin in education comes with a unique set of challenges. That means the people I speak to generally have a few very valid concerns that we have to get around before we can start talking about the actual tech.

To help resolve some of these concerns, I thought it’d be helpful for me to explain in a bit more detail what you can expect when you first get in touch with a Heimdal sales rep.

Why school IT admins switch to Heimdal

As an IT admin, you’ll know that buying cybersecurity products for a school, university, or education trust is a unique challenge.

First and foremost, the technology you’re responsible for managing can be particularly diverse, with a mix of modern tools and older, legacy products. At the same time, cybersecurity is getting more and more complex. Each time a new product is needed, you have to start researching the market from scratch – no mean feat for a one or two-person team.

But these all pale in comparison to the biggest concern: Budgets. In this sector, budgets are generally tight and immutable, meaning the consequences of getting the wrong product are much higher than for a standard organization.

It’s easy to think that these challenges are insurmountable. But when we start talking, IT admins are often surprised to hear how many we can resolve, and how many other schools and trusts we’ve done the same for. Generally, there are a few important reasons for this:

The Education Alliance decided that Heimdal was the perfect fit for our organization. Having multiple products within the suite meant it was scalable and easy to add additional schools onto the system.

If you’re looking for an antivirus product nowadays, it’s not just about the AV engine: It’s about the wrap-around of third-party patching, updates, and isolating devices when a threat appears. For me, Heimdal ticks all those boxes.

– Matt Wadsworth, Director of IT, The Education Alliance

1. Everything you need in one place

Today, an effective cybersecurity defense requires a vast plethora of different tools, including threat detection, vulnerability management, DNS network defense, privileged access management, email defense, and more. This risks creating an overlapping and complex network of different vendors, tools, and subscriptions.

Instead, Heimdal offers all these tools through one integrated dashboard and license. That makes your overall security approach simpler, cheaper, more scalable, and more resilient.

Over the years, we’ve tried various endpoint solutions, but they often posed challenges in terms of management or simply didn’t get the job done effectively. Microsoft’s WSUS server also left us frustrated when it came to handling Windows patching, and we lacked a solid solution for third-party applications. That’s when we discovered Heimdal.

Trust me, it’s a game-changer for your IT department – saving you a ton of time.

– Roy D. Bailey Jr., Chief Technology Director, SAU 67

2. Automated patching, on your own terms

Installing updates and patches is one of the most fundamental parts of an IT admin’s job. But manually installing each one is ineffective, time-consuming, and tedious. On the other hand, there are also good reasons not to install every patch immediately and automatically.

With Heimdal, you can build customizable policies to decide which patches are installed and when. For instance, high-risk vulnerabilities can be prioritized, while lower-risk patches can be scheduled for a maintenance period. Whatever you choose, we balance an automated approach that still puts you in the driver’s seat.

Heimdal has been crucial for our school’s cybersecurity. Its DNS Security feature blocks harmful websites effectively, enhancing our defenses against phishing and malware.

Additionally, the Ransomware Encryption Protection module ensures our sensitive data is secure, providing realtime detection and preventing potential ransomware attacks.

– Chris Maddocks, IT Manager, Park Community School

3. Get on the front foot with a proactive defense

Traditional security tools generally use a reactive approach by default. While these products form an important part of a layered defense, they aren’t enough to keep you safe on their own. Instead, you need a mixture of tools that can detect malicious software or activity, while preventing it from getting into your IT environment in the first place.

This includes proactive tools like DNS security, vulnerability management, privileged access management, and more – as well as the more traditional reactive options like anti-malware and ransomware encryption protection.

Heimdal offers all these tools in a single integrated license – the simplest possible way to create an integrated and layered defense.

4. Sleep easy with 24/7 managed support

An increasing number of IT admins are now realizing how important managed support is to the defense of your IT environment. That’s because it’s the only way to guarantee a quick response even if a cyber attack hits the school outside of work hours.

But not all managed support teams are built the same. The market’s largest vendors, for instance, generally tend to rely on third-party support, which can hugely vary in quality and responsiveness. At Heimdal, however, we offer in-house support to our customers and an average response time of 11 minutes. For time-pressed IT admins, this extra support is invaluable.

5. Predictable and manageable costs

When I get on the phone with an IT admin in education, cost is almost always their biggest concern. It’s no surprise why: Budgets at schools are tight and you need to know that there won’t be any nasty surprises after you’ve signed the contract.

To help alleviate these concerns, we offer a bespoke pricing plan for each customer. This gives us the flexibility to find the best possible range of services for your budget. Crucially, this pricing is based on the number of endpoints and servers being monitored. This means that costs will be stable from month to month and you’ll have plenty of visibility and control over when costs will rise and by how much.

What to expect when you get in touch with Heimdal

If you’re still apprehensive at this stage, don’t worry. We’ve signed contracts with a whole range of schools, universities, and education trusts that all had similar concerns at the start of the process. At this stage, therefore, it’s helpful to consider exactly what you can expect when you first get in touch.

But first a disclaimer: Every customer and sales process is different. Some IT admins know what they want when they get in touch and are happy to skip straight to the dotted line. If that sounds like you then, great, let’s get started. Otherwise, the process generally looks a little like this:

Initial contact

Usually, the conversation starts with someone landing in my inbox who wants to find out more about Heimdal. While each situation is unique, I often hear the same challenges coming up again and again: Increasing compliance requirements for schools and other institutions, tight budgets, and precious little time to keep researching new products.

From there, we can schedule the first chat and start making progress towards resolving these challenges.

Initial conversation

The first conversation is generally quite informal, usually just me and whoever got in contact. From here, we’ll start discussing the challenges in more detail and I’ll explain how Heimdal has helped other customers overcome them.

Often, the IT admin is surprised to hear just how common their concerns are and how many educational institutions we’ve helped to find solutions to them. From here, we’ll start planning the discovery process.

Discovery call

The discovery call is generally a more formal version of the initial conversation, usually involving more technical experts from our side and additional stakeholders from yours. Here, we’re going to start thinking seriously about the gaps in your current cybersecurity coverage and which Heimdal modules you’ll need to fill them.

In particular, we’re looking to get the best mix of proactive and reactive tools to help build an effective and layered defense for your organization. From here, we’ll start putting together a bespoke pricing plan based on your budget and requirements.

Demo

Having a demo isn’t a requirement by any means, but many stakeholders want to see the technology in action before they commit – which is absolutely fair enough. Here, we’re going to deploy demo versions of particularly pertinent threats like ransomware to demonstrate how Heimdal can combat it.

At this point, nobody is hugely surprised that Heimdal blocks the ransomware (it wouldn’t be a great demo if it didn’t…). But what people are most intrigued by is how the dashboard combines signals from different modules (e.g. threat detection, behavioral monitoring, DNS filtering, etc.) as well as third-party threat intelligence.

This gives you as much context as possible about what’s happening from a single unified dashboard. Anybody who’s ever had to click between a SIEM, EDR, or antivirus tool to work out what’s going on will really appreciate this approach, because it enables a much faster, better informed, and more focused response.

Setup and ongoing support

Too many IT admins have been burned by security vendors that promise the world, only to go radio silent as soon as the contract is signed. At Heimdal, we know that if we want to keep our customers, we have to help you succeed. I know this personally, because this is one reason why so many move on from other vendors and land in my inbox in the first place.

When you become a Heimdal customer, we’re going to build a team around you, consisting of account managers, customer success, and technical engineers. Generally, you’ll be introduced to these beforehand, so you’ll know what you’re getting into. Crucially, we offer in-house support to our customers, with an average response time of just 11 minutes. In short, we won’t leave you high and dry.

Heimdal saves time for IT admins while keeping schools safe

With tight budgets, small teams, and an ever-increasing list of security requirements, it can often feel like the challenges you’re facing are insurmountable. But if there’s one message you take away from this piece, it should be this: Countless other schools have struggled with these same issues. And with the right technology, mindset, and approach, it is possible to achieve effective cybersecurity in this context.

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably heard quite enough about Heimdal, the sales process, and what chatting with me is going to be like. Instead, here’s a final word from another IT admin who’s been using Heimdal now for several years:

From a technical perspective, Heimdal has been really positive for us. We have a good relationship with the team and from the technical side of things, we can easily see that everything that’s required of Heimdal just works as expected. It carries on in the background without us needing to do much more to it.

– Chris Maddocks, IT Manager, Park Community School

If you want to find out more, book a demo today or get in touch with me directly at mic@heimdalsecurity.com

Michael Coffer

Account Executive at Heimdal Security specializing in education cybersecurity. Helps schools across UK and Ireland build cyber resilience through accessible, integrated security solutions. Passionate about making enterprise-level protection affordable for tight budgets and safeguarding children's data.

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