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School District Uses FortiGate and FortiMail Products to Consolidate Security and Enhance Spam Filter
SUNNYVALE, Calif. - Sept. 12, 2008
- Fortinet® - the pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions -
today announced that the Abington Public Schools in Abington, Mass., has deployed Fortinet FortiGate® multi-threat security appliances to help secure its network from malicious Internet attacks. In addition, Abington Public Schools has deployed the FortiMail™ email security solution to detect, tag, quarantine and block spam messages, dramatically reducing the amount of spam traversing the network. Fortinet FortiAnalyzer™ has also been implemented to analyze and report on network usage. The combination of these products has significantly improved the school district's total cost of ownership.
The Abington Public Schools consists of the Central Office, the Early Childhood Center, Center School, North School, Woodsdale School, Frolio Middle School and Abington High School. With thousands of students and hundreds of faculty and staff, it is imperative for the school district to have a reliable and easy-to-use network security solution and a robust email security solution that would help to clear the clutter of spam.
In 2006, the school district received funding to build a fiber optic wide area network. With the improved infrastructure, the school district decided to upgrade its network security and turned to Whalley Computer Associates (wca.com), which was recently ranked among the top one percent of all computer resellers in the United States. After reviewing multiple vendors, who all had disparate solutions, Abington selected Fortinet because of the company's consolidated and comprehensive product line, which enables enhanced security, ease of management and reduced operational costs.
"Fortinet's consolidated approach to network security allows us to have a lower total cost of ownership; if we want more functionality we turn it on and we don't have to buy another appliance," said Aaron Hyre, director of technology services for the Abington Public Schools.
Two Fortinet FortiGate-100A appliances are deployed in high availability mode at the high school and help to provide firewall, anti-spam, Web filtering, intrusion prevention and IPSec VPN functionality to faculty and staff of the district. With the high school serving as the district's central data center, all information passes through the FortiGate-100A appliances for inspection.
FortiGate-50B appliances are located at remote sites such as the Early Childhood Center and the central office. Replacing firewalls, a Web filtering solution and an intrusion prevention solution provided by three vendors, has allowed the staff to consolidate the number of network security vendors to one, making central management much easier. In addition, to analyze and report on network usage, a FortiAnalyzer has been deployed at the data center.
Less Spam with FortiMail
Prior to deploying Fortinet's FortiMail the school district was relying on an outsourced hosted email solution and was seeing an increasing amount of spam coming via Adobe Acrobat file attachments. When looking for a replacement email product, FortiMail was the only solution that could scan the Acrobat PDF file format and was therefore even more effective at reducing spam traversing their network than the outsourced hosted solution and other competitive products. FortiMail is being used as a spam filtering solution and is also archiving emails for over 500 email users in the school district.
"Within a 12-hour time frame, we had 1,573 emails trying to get through the email system, but FortiMail only allowed six percent legitimate emails to come thru; the remaining 1,400 emails were spam! Because of FortiMail, we're not clogging the in-boxes of our faculty and staff with junk mail," added Hyre.
"Fortinet's consolidated network security approach, in addition to the FortiMail solution, allows customers such as the Abington Public Schools the ability to have a world-class network security solution while keeping operational expenses down and employee productivity up," said Karl Soderlund, vice president of Americas sales and business development for Fortinet.
Fortinet provides ASIC-accelerated security appliances, which are used by enterprises and service providers to enhance and consolidate their security needs while reducing total operating costs. Fortinet solutions were built from the ground up to integrate multiple levels of security protection - including firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, VPN, Web filtering and anti-spam - designed to help customers protect against network and content level threats. Delivered via its flagship FortiGate family of appliances, Fortinet provides a flexible and extensible platform of security applications and services that enable customers to deploy and centrally manage the same broad level of protection at remote locations as they have for headquarters and data center environments.
For more information on how Fortinet helps educational institutions, please visit http://www.fortinet.com/solutions/education.html
About Fortinet (www.fortinet.com)
Fortinet is the pioneer and leading provider of ASIC-accelerated unified threat management, or UTM, security systems, which are used by enterprises and service providers to increase their security while reducing total operating costs. Fortinet solutions were built from the ground up to integrate multiple levels of security protection--including firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, VPN, spyware prevention and antispam -- designed to help customers protect against network and content level threats. Leveraging a custom ASIC and unified interface, Fortinet solutions offer advanced security functionality that scales from remote office to chassis-based solutions with integrated management and reporting. Fortinet solutions have won multiple awards around the world and are the only security products that are certified in six programs by ICSA Labs: Firewall, Antivirus, IPSec VPN, SSL VPN, Network IPS, and Antispam. Fortinet is privately held and based in Sunnyvale, California.
Copyright © 2008 Fortinet, Inc. All rights reserved. The symbols ® and ™ denote respectively federally registered trademarks and unregistered trademarks of Fortinet, Inc., its subsidiaries and affiliates, including, but not limited to, the following trademarks: Fortinet, FortiGate, FortiGuard, FortiManager, FortiMail, FortiClient, FortiCare, FortiAnalyzer, FortiReporter, FortiOS, FortiASIC, FortiWiFi, FortiSwitch, FortiVoIP, FortiBIOS, FortiLog, FortiResponse, FortiDB, APSecure, and ABACAS. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners.
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