Case Study: St. Mary MacKillop College achieves Zero Trust security and enterprise‑grade ransomware protection with Illumio

How an Australian School Built Enterprise-Grade Security for Ransomware Protection

St. Mary MacKillop College, a private Catholic school in Canberra serving grades 7–12, needed to protect student records and reassure parents while operating with a small IT team (four people), about 70 virtual servers and roughly 4,000 users across on‑premises, cloud (AWS) and hypervisor environments. The college identified Zero Trust segmentation as essential but found traditional hypervisor solutions too complex and limited for their mixed environment and resource constraints.

The school deployed Illumio Core, which leverages native OS/network firewalls to deliver lightweight, scalable segmentation across on‑prem and cloud workloads. Rolled out in about three weeks, Illumio’s real‑time application dependency map gave full visibility, helped remediate unencrypted apps, misconfigured servers and open IoT ports, and now prevents lateral movement of ransomware — boosting digital safety and parent confidence.

St. Mary MacKillop College

Luke Bell

Network and Security Engineer