Case Study: Anchorage School District achieves rapid MFA rollout, 90% fewer phishing help-desk tickets and stronger FERPA compliance with Duo Security

Anchorage School District - Customer Case Study

Anchorage School District, one of the nation’s largest K–12 systems with over 100 campuses and 48,000 students, was facing a rise in successful phishing attacks against staff and faculty. CIO Mike Fleckenstein needed a proactive way to protect sensitive student and staff data (PII, financial, healthcare, email) because existing reactive monitoring and location checks could not prevent credential theft.

The district selected Duo for its ease of use and low TCO, integrating it with Cisco VPN and internal apps in hours and rolling out user self-enrollment—moving from solution choice to users authenticating in under a week. Since deployment, help-desk tickets related to phishing have dropped by almost 90%, the district meets or exceeds FERPA requirements, and IT now has device-health insights and geolocation controls to reduce breach risk.

Anchorage School District

Mike Fleckenstein

Chief Information Officer