Case Study: Merced Union High School District achieves scalable, high-performance, cost-saving network security for 10,000+ Chromebooks with Fortinet

Merced Union High School District - Customer Case Study

Merced Union High School District, serving 10,300 students across ten campuses and rolling out 11,000+ Chromebooks, faced a critical network challenge: its incumbent firewall and web-filter appliances — managed by a two-person IT team — could not sustain the massive number of concurrent sessions, threatened compliance (CIPA/HIPAA/FERPA), and required $30K/year in subscription renewals. The district needed a scalable, easy-to-manage, and cost-effective security solution to support its One-to-Web initiative and growing digital learning environment.

The district deployed two FortiGate 3700D appliances in high availability plus a FortiAnalyzer VM, consolidating firewall, web filtering, IPS, DLP, application control and VPN into a single platform. The solution delivered up to 40 GB throughput, supported millions of concurrent sessions, simplified management, eliminated $30K/year in subscriptions, reduced datacenter overhead, ensured compliance, and provided scalable capacity and redundancy to support several more years of growth.

Merced Union High School District

Allan Peterson

Chief Business Officer