Case Study: Gift of Life Michigan achieves faster, more secure organ-transplant coordination with Fortinet

Efficient and Secure Fortinet-Based Network Facilitates Organ Donations Throughout Michigan

Gift of Life Michigan, the federally designated organ procurement nonprofit based in Ann Arbor, coordinates time-sensitive donor identification, testing, recovery and transport across the state—work that depends entirely on fast, reliable, secure IT. The organization was hampered by a legacy mix of vendors, frequent wireless and network slowdowns, limited visibility into security events, and reliance on an external managed service provider, all of which risked delays in life-saving transplants.

To address this, Gift of Life Michigan standardized on the Fortinet Security Fabric—deploying FortiGate HA firewalls (including VMs in Azure), FortiSwitch, FortiAP, FortiAnalyzer and FortiSASE, plus FortiGuard services—and tightened network segmentation and centralized logging. The result was a seamless migration with minimal downtime, greatly improved speed and stability, consolidated security visibility, 300 million events blocked in 2024, elimination of the MSP contract (saving ~$30,000/year), fewer help-desk tickets, and no major security incidents since the rollout.

Gift of Life Michigan

Anderson

Director Information Technology Services