Case Study: Columbia Public Schools achieves scalable, compliant high-performance security and detailed reporting with Fortinet FortiGate 3700D

Columbia Public Schools moves FortiGate to the Head of the Class

Columbia Public Schools, a 40-location district in Missouri serving about 18,000 students and supporting 20,000+ devices on its network, faced an aging firewall infrastructure and wireless capacity limits that created throughput choke points, poor reporting, and compliance concerns. A 44-person IT team needed a reliable, high-performance solution that integrated with their Ruckus wireless environment and could be justified to the school board and community.

Following a rubric-based evaluation and side-by-side production testing against Palo Alto and SonicWALL, the district deployed two Fortinet FortiGate 3700D units in HA with a FortiAnalyzer VM (and later FortiMail). The result was scalable capacity for several years of growth, much-improved reporting and logging to support CIPA/HIPAA/FERPA and cybercrime investigations, seamless Ruckus integration to identify iPad users, scheduled guest Wi‑Fi, and overall better performance and reliability.

Columbia Public Schools

Aaron Heath

Lead Server\Network Specialist