Case Study: Athens Independent School District achieves outage‑free, simplified cybersecurity with the Fortinet Security Fabric

Pioneering Texas School District Improves Its Cybersecurity Posture with the Fortinet Security Fabric

Athens Independent School District, a small Texas district known for its four-day school week, faced critical IT challenges: a patchwork of disparate network hardware, frequent DDoS attacks and a failed legacy firewall, and a tiny IT team that had to travel to fix devices manually. These issues caused recurring network and phone outages and left the district exposed and overburdened.

Athens replaced its legacy stack with the Fortinet Security Fabric—including FortiGate NGFWs in HA, FortiSwitch, FortiAP, FortiEDR, FortiAuthenticator, FortiVoice, FortiAnalyzer and FortiMonitor—backed by FortiGuard services. The integrated solution delivered transparent firewall failover, reliable phone service, network segmentation and rapid EDR containment, giving staff real-time visibility and saving the IT team roughly four to five hours a day while preventing malware spread and eliminating frequent outages.

Athens Independent School District

Tony Brooks

Director of Technology