Paulding County School District
High Volume of Wi-Fi Traffic and Lean Staff Make Fortinet the Right Provider for Georgia School District
Download Case StudyOverview
With a student population of 32,000, the Paulding County School District is Georgia’s 11th largest district. Faced with tight budgets and an increasingly challenging cybersecurity environment, the district prioritizes working with technology partners that can provide the right tools and expertise to secure its network and scale to meet its growing digital footprint.
Paulding County School District has deployed a comprehensive secure networking solution from Fortinet, centered on FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) deployed in pairs at each of the district’s data centers. The NGFWs are augmented by FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services and provide high-performance security capabilities such as web-content filtering. The secure networking solution includes switching and wireless access as well as centralized management and network segmentation to guard against lateral movement. Fortinet also provides a security operations logging and reporting solution, and “work from anywhere” capabilities that enable secure remote working for students. With Fortinet, Paulding County School District has reduced the cost of its network and dramatically reduced IT staff time spent on networking and security, helping the district make the most of its financial and human resources.
“What we have with Fortinet is a true partnership. Fortinet understands our footprint and provides appropriate knowledge transfer, which helps us ensure we have the most secure network. We feel that Fortinet is really going in the right direction with the education sector.”
– Julie Ragsdale, CIO, Paulding County School District
Business Impact
Networkwide visibility for prompt response to security events
Firewalls, switches, and access points handle high volume of content streaming across more than 30,000 simultaneous wireless device connections
Minimized learning curve for any additional Fortinet solutions because of shared, easy-to-use FortiOS operating system
Reduced staff time for incident response, as 80%–90% of actions can be taken from central location vs. staff member traveling to remote location
Centralized management of firewall policies frees up staff time for other tasks
Lower total cost of ownership (TCO), largely because each staff member can manage multiple networking and security products
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