Case Study: HEAnet secures Ireland’s 4,000 primary and secondary schools against web-based threats with Fortinet FortiGate

Fortinet secures Ireland’s 4,000 primary and secondary schools against web-based threats

HEAnet, Ireland’s national research and education network provider, was tasked in 2005 with building and managing a Schools Network backbone to give 4,000 primary and secondary schools safe Internet access for roughly 800,000 users. The challenge was to deliver scalable, high‑performance web content filtering and antivirus protection across varied broadband links while keeping management overhead low and ensuring the network could handle very large throughputs without degrading performance.

HEAnet chose Fortinet’s chassis‑based FortiGate-5140 platform (with FortiGate-5001 blades and FortiManager) deployed in two datacenters and routed via two PoPs for resilience, enabling centralized filtering and multi‑threat protection. The solution supported an aggressive rollout (about 500 schools per month), successfully blocked inappropriate content and malware, and maintained high availability and throughput; 96% of surveyed schools reported a safer online environment and over 75% were more inclined to use the Internet after deployment.

HEAnet

Ronan Byrne

Special Programmes Manager