St John’s College, one of the historic colleges of the University of Oxford, has significantly strengthened its cybersecurity posture with the implementation of a Managed Vulnerability Management (MVM) programme delivered by long-term partner ANSecurity.
Founded in 1555, St John’s supports a diverse community of more than 600 students, a large number of staff and over 100 academic fellows across multiple sites in Oxford. With a small in-house IT team and growing cyber threats, the college needed a proactive solution to improve visibility, reduce risks, and free up internal resources.
MVM service
After more than 13 years of collaboration, the college turned to ANSecurity to design and deploy an MVM service built on Tenable Nessus.
The service includes daily credentialed scans, automated vulnerability notifications, remediation validation, and monthly strategic reviews with ANSecurity consultants.
Measurable results
Since launching the programme in May, St John’s College has achieved:
- Over 50% reduction in critical and high-severity vulnerabilities
- Resolution of systemic issues such as broken Windows Updates, unsupported software, and weak cipher suite configurations
- Improved ability to challenge vendors using outdated or insecure systems
- Strategic resource allocation, allowing IT staff to focus on high-impact security tasks
Matt Jennings, IT Manager at St John’s College Oxford said: “This service has freed up internal resources and helped us stop playing ‘whack-a-mole’ with vulnerabilities. We now know what to focus on, and how to do it. The support from ANSecurity has been invaluable in helping us become more strategic and effective.”
Proactive cycle of risk management
The programme has also introduced a proactive cycle of risk management, with daily monitoring of public-facing systems, monthly vulnerability summaries, and overnight verification of patch updates.
St John’s College has worked with ANSecurity since 2013 on projects including firewall replacements, wireless network deployments, and strategic consultancy. The MVM programme marks the latest step in the college’s modernisation of its cybersecurity defences.
Matt Jennings added: “ANSecurity have always been responsive, professional, and understanding of our requirements. Their engineers are not only experts in their field, but also able to explain complicated issues clearly. We look forward to working with them for many years to come.”
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