- PAST EVENT HIGHLIGHTS
Exploring Zero Trust Network Access
SAFE STUDENTS, SMOOTH ACCESS
- Online Webinar
- April 2026
- Syscomm x Extreme Networks
Vol. V
Special Edition
April 2026
Syscomm x Extreme Network Present
Exploring Zero Trust Access Network
Online Webinar
Free Admission
Your VLANs Have Been Doing Their Best. It’s Time They Got Some Help.
With the DfE’s 2030 digital standards now demanding segmentation, least-privilege access, and cyber security baselines for every school and college, Syscomm’s Anton Beehl joined Extreme Networks’ Robert Wright to cut through the noise on Zero Trust: what it actually means, what it replaces, and how Cloud NAC is making it achievable for the first time.
98% of UK universities, 88% of further education colleges, and 73% of secondary schools reported a cyber breach or attack in the last 12 months. These aren’t projections, they’re findings from the UK Government’s own Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/26. The tools many institutions still rely on static VLANs, manual ACLs, and traditional VPNs, which were built for a different era. And the NCSC, the DfE’s 2030 digital standards, and the Cyber Essentials framework are all now pointing in the same direction: segmentation, least-privilege access, monitoring, and zero-trust network access control.
That was the starting point for our April webinar with Extreme Networks, where Anton Beehl from Syscomm and Robert Wright, Technology Leader at Extreme, spent an hour unpacking why Network Access Control and Zero Trust aren’t just buzzwords on a vendor roadmap. They’re the practical response to a threat that’s already inside the building.
98%
of UK universities breached (2025/26)
88%
of FE colleges
breached (2025/26)
73%
of secondary schools
breached (2025/26)
~80%
of network outages
caused by human error
The conversation was grounded in reality. Syscomm has recovered over 200 organisations from ransomware in the last three years, from primary schools to universities with 800+ servers. The damage goes far beyond downtime: lost research funding, reputational harm, families forced to take time off when schools shut, and the slow, painful rebuild that follows.
“What used to take weeks of configuring RADIUS servers, PKI, and switch-by-switch policies now happens in a single cloud platform. Identity-based access, posture checks, least privilege, can now be deployed in hours, not months.”
What We Covered
01
Why VLANs, ACLs & VPNs Are No Longer Enough
Static port-based VLANs don’t prevent lateral movement. ACLs are manual, error-prone, and don’t log denied traffic. VPNs grant full subnet access once credentials are in. We explored how each of these creates gaps that attackers exploit and why microsegmentation matters when the CrowdStrike 2026 Threat Report clocks the average breakout time at just 29 minutes.
02
Robert walked through the complexity of deploying traditional on-prem NAC, configuring hundreds of APs and switches, managing RADIUS, PKI, DHCP relay, and all the error-prone touch points that come with it. Then showed how Extreme’s Universal ZTNA running on Platform ONE reduces that to a single toggle.
03
Who you are, what device you’re on, where you’re connecting from, what time of day it is, and what you’re trying to access. That’s the zero trust equation. We saw how Platform ONE Security integrates natively with Microsoft Entra, Google Workspace, Okta, and Intune for posture verification, quarantining unpatched devices automatically and re-admitting them once remediated.
04
Vape detectors in bathrooms. Student laptops with no MDM. Staff personal phones on the school Wi-Fi. The session explored how Cloud PKI simplifies BYOD onboarding, how MAC authentication handles IoT devices that can’t do 802.1X, and why device posture checks are now non-negotiable.
Read: Extreme for K-12 Education →
05
With only 37% of FE colleges having dedicated cyber security staff, the skills gap in education is real. Robert demonstrated Extreme’s conversational AI assistant, which turned a 7-minute prompt into a step-by-step Zero Trust deployment guide that would have taken hours to compile manually. Plus: the “human in the loop” approach to AI-suggested network changes.
06
Every denied access attempt is logged. Every authentication event is tracked. Every user’s application map is visible. We saw how Platform ONE Security provides the layered audit trail that traditional ACLs and VLANs simply can’t — and why that matters for both incident response and compliance with the DfE’s digital standards.
Your Speakers
Account Director, Syscomm
Saira leads Syscomm’s Governance, Risk and Compliance practice, helping organisations achieve certification across frameworks including Cyber Essentials, CE Plus, and ISO 27001. With a background as a Cyber Essentials assessor, Saira brings a rare perspective to the process — she knows exactly what assessors are looking for, and where organisations get caught out.
Technology Leader, Extreme Networks
Mark helps organisations move beyond reactive, fragmented security towards a posture that is deliberate, resilient, and aligned to real-world threats. Drawing on Syscomm’s experience across 220+ security incident recoveries, Mark understands the gaps that lead to breaches in the first place.
Webinar Highlight
Watch the highlights from our Zero Trust webinar with Extreme Networks covering Cloud NAC, identity-based access, and what it means for education.
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Zero Trust Network Access · Vol. V · Online Webinar · April 2026
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