Case Study: Derby College achieves always-on connectivity and zero IT complaints with Fortinet FortiGate

Providing Always-on Connectivity for Derby College’s Growing Community

Derby College Group, one of the UK’s largest further education providers serving 30,000+ students, was facing recurring outages and security gaps as demand for anytime, anywhere access overwhelmed its ageing IT stack. The college’s firewall was running at 100% CPU, appliances couldn’t cope, and it urgently needed stronger web filtering, application control and a fast replacement before existing licences expired.

The college deployed Fortinet’s FortiGate 800 Series with UTM licences at the network edge, migrating in hours to an all‑in‑one platform that provides web filtering, ISP protection and application control while removing the need for a separate filtering server. The result was simpler management, lower hardware and licensing costs, customized filtering alerts, resilient always‑on connectivity and a drop in IT support calls to zero.

Derby College