Case Study: Okeechobee County School District meets insurer’s strict cybersecurity requirements with Fortinet

Fortinet Helps a Florida School District Meet Its Insurer’s Strict New Requirements

Okeechobee County School District, a rural Florida district serving about 6,000 students across 10 schools, faced a sudden upgrade in cybersecurity demands from its insurer that threatened its coverage. The district relied on Gmail’s basic spam protections and a third‑party endpoint solution that was hard to manage and didn’t enforce policies reliably, leaving the network exposed to ransomware and other attacks.

The district deployed Fortinet solutions—primarily FortiEDR across ~1,000 endpoints (with FortiGate, FortiAnalyzer and FortiMail integrated)—to centralize management, test and enforce policies, and gain deep visibility into applications and malware. FortiEDR uncovered previously undetected threats and unauthorized apps, enabled one‑click, group‑based policy rollouts, cut daily monitoring time by about an hour, improved detection/response, and brought the district into compliance with insurer requirements.

Okeechobee County School District

Rashan Jones

Coordinator, Network Systems