SECURING ONE OF AMERICA’S LARGEST SCHOOL DISTRICTS

“While data security remains part of our daily thought processes, we’re assured that it’s being managed by security experts at Moasic451 capitalizing on best-in-class security with the Fortinet FortiGate 5000s.” – Troy Miller Director of Technical Resources Clark County School District

As the fifth-largest school district in the U.S., Clark County School District (CCSD) encompasses 8,000 square miles of southern Nevada, including the greater Las Vegas area. It educates 320,000 students across 357 schools and employs more than 40,000 staff. 75% of all students in Nevada come through the CCSD system.

DEVICE PROLIFERATION ESCALATES CYBER RISK In recent years, government funding has enabled the purchase of tablets and notebooks for educational purposes and consequently the number of individual devices connecting to CCSD’s network has increased significantly. In addition, under a ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) program, students, teachers, and staff also access the network with personal mobile devices. On any given day, the infrastructure is supporting around 400,000 endpoints and 120,000 unique IP addresses. The district’s legacy firewall was failing to handle some of the network’s challenges. Troy Miller, CCSD’s Director of Technical Resources, recalled, “Every day, we experienced what amounted to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The incoming packets were fragmented and the firewall couldn’t handle it, and would just die. The vendor was sending us on a ‘wild goose chase’ every time we called for support; we never came close to fixing the issue.” He continued, “This created a major impact on the teaching staff and pupils: Access to teaching materials was impossible, online resources for class assignments and homework couldn’t be reached, and none of the district’s computer-based admin functions performed correctly. Given the vast number of people effected, this was a totally unacceptable situation.”

NETWORK SECURITY WITH HONORS Miller turned to Mosaic451 – the district’s Managed Security Service Provider partner for IT security – and it recommended CCSD install Fortinet FortiGate next-generation firewalls as replacements for the failing devices. Miller was eager to mitigate the risk swiftly, he noted, “Mosaic flew in Fortinet consultants immediately. They were here racking equipment the very

DETAILS CUSTOMER: Clark County School District INDUSTRY: Education LOCATION: Nevada, USA PARTNER: Platinum MSSP Mosaic451

SOLUTION nnFortiGate

5000 Series

BUSINESS IMPACT nnProtects

students’ online identities

nnEnables

staff to access resources needed to deliver their classes

nnManages

increasing volume of data traffic without constant hardware upgrades

nnKeeps

data traffic flowing smoothly with data shaping

nnQuickly

identifies and responds to infected devices

CASE STUDY

CASE STUDY: SECURING ONE OF AMERICA’S LARGEST SCHOOL DISTRICTS

next day! I was impressed by the way they went above and beyond the call of duty to protect the children and our staff expeditiously.”

100,000 Microsoft Windows endpoints connected to the network and the FortiGates enable us to control traffic when a Windows update gets issued.”

Two FortiGate 5000 series firewalls were deployed with active and passive failover, located directly behind CCSD’s edge The FortiGates also facilitate VPN tunnels for employee access to router. Normally utilized for high-speed service providers or the intranet and mainframe applications, as well as process traffic telecommunications carrier networks, the 5000 series is ideal for for CCSD’s cloud-hosting platform. Miller’s team leverages them to the district because it integrates flexible carrier-class hardware proactively monitor network traffic and locate any infected BYOD components with an advanced Security endpoints for the immediate dispatch Processing Unit (SPU) for enhanced of a user support technician to mitigate WE NOW HAVE PEACE OF throughput, and leverages consolidated the risk. MIND THAT THE CHILDREN’S security from the FortiOS operating system. “Today, we have a safeguarded

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ONLINE IDENTITIES ARE BEING APPROPRIATELY PROTECTED AND OUR STAFF ARE ABLE TO SECURELY AND EFFICIENTLY ACCESS THE RESOURCES THEY NEED TO DELIVER THEIR CLASSES

SECURITY WITH SO MUCH MORE In addition to providing protection from external threats, the FortiGates help the district configure traffic shaping to enable optimal performance and appropriate prioritization of resources. “This capability is very useful when a large number of devices are receiving the same data,” noted Miller. “For example, there are over

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perimeter. While data security remains part of our daily thought processes, we’re assured that it’s being managed by security experts at Mosaic451 capitalizing on best-in-class security with the FortiGate 5000s. The technology behind these firewalls is superior; being able to leverage capabilities far beyond those of our legacy firewall is enabling us stay ahead of CCSD’s network growth rate. Most importantly, we now have peace of mind that the children’s online identities are being appropriately protected and our staff are able to securely and efficiently access the resources they need to deliver their classes,” concluded Miller.

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“These FortiGates are the front wall to our ‘castle’,” Miller quipped. “The 5000 series supports 46 million concurrent sessions. This gives us the capacity to handle ever-increasing volumes of network traffic without having to worry about frequent hardware upgrades.”

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