Case Study: Spring Branch ISD boosts K–12 security and operational efficiency with Fortinet Security Fabric

How a Lean Team Is Keeping K-12 Students and Staff Secure

Spring Branch Independent School District is a large K–12 district in the Houston area serving 35,000 students across 47 campuses with a remarkably lean security team of about 1.5 FTEs. The district needed to secure a dispersed, high‑throughput network (building toward 100‑Gig), reduce manual triage of alerts and phishing, and future‑proof infrastructure without expanding staff or budgets.

Spring Branch deployed the Fortinet Security Fabric—FortiGate NGFWs plus FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, FortiSIEM, FortiMail, FortiAuthenticator and FortiSOAR—centralizing visibility, tuning SIEM ingestion, and automating responses. The result: a single pane of glass for faster troubleshooting, FortiMail blocking roughly 90% of malicious emails, about four hours a day reclaimed for the two‑person team, and a scalable, automated security posture ready for broader endpoint rollout.

Spring Branch ISD

Troy Neal

Executive Director, Cybersecurity and Technology Operations