Case Study: McLean County School District 5 secures 4,300 remote students and eliminates 4,000+ security risks with Palo Alto Networks WildFire and GlobalProtect

Palo Alto Networks Gets Top Marks for Securing Students

McLean County School District 5, an Illinois K–12 district serving 13,500 students and 2,500 staff across 28 schools, needed to secure a one-to-one laptop rollout for 4,300 middle school students (with up to 3,000 more planned) while preserving bandwidth, meeting CIPA requirements, and reducing a heavy IT burden on a 10-person staff that spent 45% of its time cleaning infections. Existing VPNs were costly and hard to manage, and the district needed a scalable, easy-to-administer solution to protect remote users and enable classroom online resources.

The district deployed Palo Alto Networks WildFire and GlobalProtect on two PA-2050 appliances (with WildFire, Threat Prevention, and GlobalProtect subscriptions), which immediately blocked phishing and thousands of threats, replaced legacy antivirus, and enforced content and application policies on- and off-campus. Deployment was quick (policies applied to 4,300 devices in a few clicks), delivered one-time savings of $25,000 plus $6,500 annually, saved IT hours through automation, improved bandwidth use, and added practical benefits like secure remote printing and controlled camera access for emergency response.

The McLean County School District

Justin Lightfoot

Network Administrator