Case Study: School District of Philadelphia achieves micro-segmentation, automation and major cost & time savings with Fortinet

School District of Philadelphia - Customer Case Study

The School District of Philadelphia, the eighth-largest U.S. district with more than 134,000 students and 18,000 staff, was struggling to secure a highly virtualized server environment and a fleet of 50,000+ Chromebooks. Its legacy firewall could not keep up with growing needs for micro-segmentation, policy control, federated web filtering, and compliance reporting, creating visibility and management challenges for east–west application traffic.

Following a production test of next‑generation firewalls, the district deployed a mix of virtual and physical FortiGate appliances integrated with VMware NSX to enforce layer 4–7 policies and protect distributed workloads and storage. The move delivered higher performance and uptime, automation-driven efficiency and micro-segmentation, simplified compliance reporting, an upper‑six‑figure annual saving from retiring a web proxy, and more than 500 hours saved each year in security administration.

School District of Philadelphia

Keith Busby

Executive Director for IT Security