Case Study: Coleg Gwent achieves high-performance, scalable and secure Internet access with Fortinet

Coleg Gwent Calls on Fortinet for Increased Performance

Coleg Gwent is a further and higher education college serving about 23,500 staff and students across eight sites in southeast Wales. The college was struggling with slow and unreliable internet caused by an overtaxed 100 Mbps feed and aging security appliances—an old Cisco firewall and Bloxx proxy—that couldn’t keep up with growing traffic, granular user policies or proxy-avoidance by students.

After a successful proof-of-concept, Coleg Gwent deployed a high-availability pair of FortiGate-621B appliances to replace the legacy firewall and web filter. Complaints stopped almost immediately as throughput and reliability improved, inline filtering eliminated proxy-avoidance, Active Directory integration enabled fast, granular user policies, and admins can now unblock legitimate sites within minutes. The upgrade has given the college headroom to increase bandwidth (to 200–300 Mbps and beyond) and turn on additional security services without performance degradation.

Coleg Gwent

Evan Smith

ICT Infrastructure Manager