SUNNYVALE, Calif., May 8, 2006- Fortinet - the pioneer and leading provider of multi-threat security solutions- today announced that the ivière du Nord School Board, covering 36 primary schools, seven secondary schools and nine professional training centers, of Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, has deployed the FortiGate™-3600 enterprise-class security system to protect its campus network that supports more than 25,000 students and administrators.

With 24,000 students across its primary schools alone, ivière du Nord School Board's IT staff had strong concerns about malicious network attacks, especially viruses and spyware. With the number of Internet users increasing and putting a greater demand on network bandwidth, the school commission required a high-performance security system that could protect against all types of unwanted and malicious threats and also monitor and filter inappropriate Web content. To do this, the team replaced its Novell BorderManager Solution with the Fortinet's FortiGate-3600 enterprise multi-threat security appliance, equipped with FortiGuard Web Filtering and FortiGuard Antivirus subscription services.

Fortinet Increases Protection and Improves OI
In working with its reseller, NWD MicroAge, iviere du Nord chose Fortinet over SonicWall and SurfControl due to the FortiGate-3600 system's more comprehensive security, advanced Web content filtering capabilities, and overall cost-effectiveness. NWD MicroAge, which has been successfully operating within the IT industry for more than 15 years, was instrumental in helping iviere du Nord determine the best and most affordable security solution for its network.

"Implementing a unified threat management solution from Fortinet has allowed us to significantly increase our network security while reducing costs," said Jean Ngo, IT Coordinator for ivière du Nord School Board. "We've practically eliminated the malicious content and other threats entering our network and reduced the amount of time required to manage and monitor our security activities and the costs associated with maintaining individual firewall, antivirus, Web content filtering and antispam licenses."

Ngo also said that he was drawn to and impressed with the Fortinet solution over others because of the system's user-friendly interface and ability to allow the school to monitor Instant Messaging (IM) traffic. Both of these features were recently introduced in Fortinet's new FortiOS 3.0 firmware, which delivers management enhancements and expanded support for IM and P2P threat management including granular access control, monitoring and audit, antivirus and intrusion/attack prevention.

Fortinet's market-leading FortiGate systems are ASIC-accelerated security appliances that deliver real-time network protection through the integration of a broad range of security functions -- including firewall, virtual private networking (VPN), antivirus, intrusion prevention (IPS), Web filtering, traffic shaping, anti-spam and anti-spyware. FortiGate systems are kept up to date automatically through Fortinet's FortiGuard™ Network, which delivers continuous and automatic signature 'push' updates that ensure protection against the latest viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware, intrusions and other threats around the clock, and around the world.

"Educational institutions, typically with a large base of Internet and peer-to-peer application users, are increasingly vulnerable to today's multithreats, such as viruses, worms and spyware," said Graham Bushkes, Fortinet's country manager for Canada. "To maintain the integrity of their networks and meet regulatory compliance, it is imperative for these schools to eliminate malicious attacks and protect against inappropriate web usage and content. We are pleased that by deploying Fortinet's FortiGate systems, iviere du Nord has been able to achieve a level of security that can do both, while also staying within stringent budgetary constrains."