Case Study: Fairfax County Public Schools achieves secure, scalable BYOD onboarding with RUCKUS Networks’ Cloudpath Enrollment System

Embracing Bring-Your-Own-Device Via Cloudpath Enrollment System

Fairfax County Public Schools, a large district serving about 180,000 students and 23,000 staff across 194 schools, faced a rapid rise in personally owned smartphones, laptops, and tablets using an insecure guest SSID. The district wanted to move this BYOD population to WPA2‑Enterprise—the strongest wireless security offering—but doing so required complex device configuration that could increase user friction and IT support costs.

FCPS deployed Ruckus Cloudpath Enrollment System to provide a self‑service onboarding flow: users join an onboarding SSID (FCPSonboard), accept a use policy, and Cloudpath automatically configures devices for the secure WPA2‑Enterprise network. The solution enabled seamless, scalable BYOD access for the district’s 180,000 students and 23,000 staff (about 120,000 concurrent users), delivering strong encryption and authentication with minimal IT involvement and reduced support burden.

Fairfax County Public Schools

Neal Shelton

Network Engineering Supervisor