Case Study: Hillsborough Community College achieves secure, scalable BYOD access and PII compliance with Fortinet FortiGate

HCC Makes Access to Education Easy and Secure

Hillsborough Community College (HCC) in Tampa, Florida serves over 47,000 students across five campuses and faced a major security challenge after a campus-wide BYOD rollout. The surge in devices and traffic exposed limitations in its legacy firewall—poor visibility, no packet inspection, and a heavy remediation burden—while the college also needed to meet PII compliance on a tight budget.

After lab testing multiple vendors, HCC deployed Fortinet FortiGate 1500D appliances, gaining centralized visibility, segmentation, and integrated protections (IPS/IDS, DLP, DoS). The rollout met performance and compliance requirements, slashed malware alerts to just a few a month, reduced support overhead, enabled BYOD without extra security spending, and provided scalable, cost-effective protection across all locations.

Hillsborough Community College

Kenneth Compres

Senior Network Security and Integration Engineer