Educational institutions face a myriad of IT challenges and typically must solve them with limited budgets. With ever-increasing bring your own devices (BYOD) by students, faculty, and administrators, educational organizations need to scale bandwidth and provide secure access. Sensitive information must be secured and compliance standards protecting students, such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), and Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), must be met. While it’s key for educational institutions to have the latest security and networking technologies, limited budgets can make it seem impossible to purchase and then find the resources to manage them.

Fortinet understands challenges educators face in delivering engaging, relevant, and meaningful learning opportunities to students while maintaining a high level of network security to protect data and meet compliance standards.

To aid educational institutions with their network security, the Fortinet Security Fabric supports a highly resilient cyber program for digitally transforming schools. As schools adapt their IT infrastructure to enable digital transformation, they must also undergo a security transformation to protect against the constantly expanding attack surface.

The Security Fabric provides educational institutions with a proactive and transformative approach to their cybersecurity plan. It integrates security solutions, allowing them to share threat intelligence and deliver fast, automated responses to threats anywhere in the network while providing IT staff full visibility of security events throughout the borderless network.

K-12 technology teams aim to enable eLearning and the digital transformation on campuses while protecting students and staff through network and physical security. Schools need surveillance solutions that integrate into the network to ensure the cameras and recording devices have dedicated network bandwidth without any degradation in performance or interruption in connectivity. Just as important, having physical security devices, such as cameras or recording devices, reside on a next-generation firewall (NGFW) would keep them safe from attacks and unknown threats.

Additionally, K-12 technology directors face specific compliance regulations designed to protect children and sensitive personal data, such as the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) or the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

The Fortinet Security Fabric provides K-12 with the necessary cybersecurity so schools can ensure that their physical security devices have sustained high-performance network bandwidth while protecting physical security devices from threats. The Security Fabric adapts to the unique challenges and needs of the K-12 environment to align with various schools’ security journeys.

The Fortinet solution for K-12 education:

• Reduces complexity with end-to-end, consolidated network and wireless access security.
• Saves IT resources with centralized security management for endpoint, firewall, wireless, and WAN connectivity.
• Provides comprehensive security across threat vectors, including DDoS attack mitigation, content filtering, email security (including data loss prevention), and application control.

Delivers security proven effective in independent third-party testing from NSS Labs.

Colleges and universities face a variety of challenges in managing and securing their networks. IT professionals on campuses must adapt to students and staff from adding new and unknown devices to the network. Bring your own device (BYOD) is the new norm on college campuses, and not every device brought onto a network is secure or meets a network’s security requirements. BYOD also brings mobile applications, expanding the attack surface to the cloud. Each person may use a different mobile application than the other, creating a multi-cloud environment within the network. Cloud security and compliance is key to successful cloud adoption.

Limited visibility to network activity is another risk as it is nearly impossible for IT professionals to monitor each device and user already on or brought onto the network. Devices are in the classrooms, student union centers, cafeterias, campus housing, and everywhere in between. Students and teachers share information via the web, email, personal storage and more—detecting and blocking threats from endpoints is critical to network safety.

Fortinet’s Security Fabric provides university-wide cybersecurity without compromising performance or hampering user experience, all while staying in line with university technology and business requirements. Beyond next-generation firewalls (NGFW) Fortinet can provide colleges with a solution that covers all attack vectors from the cloud to mobile and web applications to endpoint protection. Our security products can also be integrated with other products and services to further extend security where it is needed most.

Providing a broad, integrated, and automated approach to cybersecurity, the Fortinet Security Fabric is a comprehensive solution encompassing a wide range of technologies that work together.

Securing the connected campus

Colleges and universities offer a target-rich environment that contains everything from financial, medical, and personal data profiles to government and commercial research, making information security a top priority. Detecting attacks and mitigating their impact has become increasingly difficult. Visibility is limited across disparate parts of the institution: residence halls, research facilities, classrooms, and offices. And when an attack occurs, it can spread rapidly.

The FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall protects campus networks from known and unknown threats and includes multiple security and networking controls, as well as a Wi-Fi controller in a single platform for reduced complexity, ease of management, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).