Case Study: Clay County Schools District achieves secure, high-performance online learning across 42 schools with Bitdefender GravityZone

Clay County Schools District teaches cyberthreats a lesson

Clay County Schools District, which serves about 38,500 K–12 students across 42 schools, needed reliable, CIPA‑compliant endpoint protection for thousands of mixed Windows and Apple devices, physical servers and virtual machines. Previous products (Kaspersky, Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection and Avast) caused performance problems, crashes or required disabling key features, leaving the district vulnerable — so the district evaluated vendors and selected Bitdefender, deploying GravityZone Enterprise Security.

Bitdefender implemented GravityZone (Security for Endpoints and Security for Virtualized Environments) via its management console across roughly 11,000 endpoints, 100 physical servers and ~250 VMs. Bitdefender’s virtual appliance offloads heavy processing, improving VM performance, while machine‑learning detection, environment‑aware firewalling and content filtering protect devices on and off the network. The deployment automatically blocked malicious batch files and USB threats, prevented ransomware (including WannaCry/Petya) without updates, cut security‑related help desk calls through proactive reporting, and blocked at least two batch‑file attacks that helped the district avoid recovery costs similar to a prior $10,000 incident.

Clay County Schools District

Jon Skipper

Information Services Supervisor