Case Study: School District of Chilliwack achieves 30% bandwidth reduction and stronger security with Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks® Gets Top Marks for Solving Bandwidth and Security Issues for School District

The School District of Chilliwack in British Columbia, serving over 13,000 students across 37 schools, faced growing pains from a population boom: centralized network traffic, heavy internet use (including pervasive BitTorrent activity), and limited visibility into who was using which applications led to saturated links, slow applications, and internal security risks. IT needed a solution that tied activity to users, enforced flexible policies, and reduced bandwidth strain without a steep learning curve.

The district deployed Palo Alto Networks next‑generation firewalls (PA‑2000 Series, PA‑200 and PA‑500), integrated with Active Directory and used to decentralize resources and create site VPNs. The result was granular, user‑based application control, elimination of BitTorrent abuse, about a 30% reduction in bandwidth consumption, improved Internet reliability, stronger security, easier administration and significant projected cost savings from server consolidation.

Chilliwack School District

Randy Janzen

IT Foreman