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Upper Grand District School Board

Canadian School District Enhances Remote User Security and Drives Operational Efficiencies with FortiSASE

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Business Impact

Challenge

  • Provide work-from-anywhere protection for staff and students
  • Secure a massive footprint of 38,000 endpoints
  • Comply with Ontario Ministry of Education requirements for cloud-based endpoint protection

Solution

  • Implement a Fortinet Secure SD-WAN across 76 sites
  • Centralize the management and control of networking and security
  • Integrate FortiSASE to enable secure access everywhere

50%

reduction in staff hours for solution maintenance and operations

5x

faster user onboarding

Results

  • 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

Products used

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

With Fortinet, UGDSB could meet the Ministry of Education’s requirements by adding a security layer. The school board’s SD-WAN solution has evolved to integrate FortiSASE, which provides a full set of networking and security capabilities delivered from the cloud. The result is improved security, visibility, performance, and management efficiency.

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“We needed more protection for our students because we are 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 Systems Engineer, Upper Grand District School Board

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