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Overview

The Upper Grand District School Board (UGDSB) in Canada needed to protect its 40,000 staff and students across a distributed environment with a large number of devices. Given the thousands of endpoints in circulation, UGDSB found certificate management a considerable challenge. As a result, the district had started to consider a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture as a solution. The search for such was given added urgency when Ontario’s Ministry of Education issued a reference architecture to school boards requesting a cloud-based endpoint protection strategy.

Leveraging a Single Vendor to Provide SASE, Evolution of Secure Learning Environment from Anywhere

With Fortinet, UGDSB could meet the Ministry of Education’s requirements simply by adding a security layer, rather than bolting something on the side. It deployed the FortiSASE solution as an extension of the existing Fortinet Security Fabric, with the same policies and consistent operations. The school board’s secure software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) solution has now evolved to integrate FortiSASE, which provides a full set of networking and security capabilities delivered from the cloud including Secure Web Gateway (SWG), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), cloud access security broker (CASB), and Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS)—all managed though a single user interface. The result is improved security, visibility, performance, and management efficiency.

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“We needed more protection for our students because we're really good at protecting them on-premises with the UTM on the firewalls. But we needed that functionality to move with them wherever they went anywhere, anytime. We moved to SASE because it was an evolution for us...it was moving away from the concept of, ‘we teach in the school,’ to allowing them to learn from anywhere in the world.”

– Ryan Buhrow, Enterprise System Engineer, Upper Grand District School Board 

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Business Impact

50% reduction in staff hours for solution maintenance and operations

Five times faster user onboarding

SSL inspection at scale

Ministry of Education architecture evolution alignment 

Smooth migration and integration

Consistent security across schools, staff, and students, wherever their location

Superior user experience and secure access to corporate applications

 


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Fortinet came out on top. FortiSASE seamlessly integrates with our existing products while protecting our previous Fortinet investments. And, it was easy to extend FortiClient to FortiSASE, which freed us from needing to train our people on a new SASE solution. FortiSASE was really the next step in our network evolution.”
- Peter VanDorp, Cybersecurity Analyst, Wellington Catholic District School Board
Our experience with the FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls [NGFWs] has been great, and we were impressed by the level of integration enabled by the broader Fortinet Security Fabric, as well as Fortinet’s competitive pricing. Importantly, Fortinet could also provide the level of security required to access federal government and state funding and deliver against the NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] Cybersecurity Framework.”
- Eric Scholl, Chief Security Officer, GASD
Security alerts happen all the time, and in order for me to do anything else with my day, I need to have information at my fingertips. Fortinet’s solutions provide me with just that.”
- David Cooper, Network Analyst, East Stroudsburg Area School District

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