School District Gives the Highest Grade to WatchGuard for Security
Challenge
Every school needs a support system, and the Mecosta-Osceola Intermediate School District (MOISD) was established to meet that need. MOISD is a service agency that provides support to its local school districts. From providing vocational training for students, professional development for teachers, foster care to programming for the special needs population, MOISD provides the resources to support both the schools and the community as a whole.
Because the school district sees heavy volumes of network traffic every day, they needed a solution that was both reliable and affordable. Initially, MOISD turned to Fortinet for their network security solution. But over time, MOISD began to experience growing costs and the appliance had significant downtime during critical operations. This prompted MOISD to search for a new vendor, and after evaluating SonicWall and Cisco, MOISD ultimately chose WatchGuard. “We needed a cost-effective solution that was reliable. For this reason, WatchGuard fit the bill perfectly,” explained Fred Sharpsteen, CTO and technology director at Mecosta-Osceola Intermediate School District.
Solution
MOISD chose to deploy multiple Firebox M470 and T15 appliances with Total Security Suite in order to activate dependable and advanced security services to each location. Plus, the technical training that MOISD received from WatchGuard made the switch from Fortinet seamless. “After a couple of training sessions, all our former policies and rules were easily duplicated on the WatchGuard appliance. Along the way, technical support was very knowledgeable and helpful in every step of the process,” reflected Fred.
Additionally, the costs were another major benefit to MOISD when switching to WatchGuard from Fortinet. With WatchGuard, Fred always receives more advanced security services at a practical price with complete visibility into the network at all times. Fred commented, “Our WatchGuard solutions are very reasonable. We even have great visibility and reporting now – all included – which was never in the case when using Fortinet.”
Results
After deploying WatchGuard solutions, MOISD now has a reliable advanced security solution that will protect them from emerging threats while being attractively priced. As an added bonus, Fred can easily view network traffic for each district and make adjustments when applicable. “Our WatchGuard solution is reliable, and we’ve never had to worry. What’s nice is we didn’t incur additional costs with WatchGuard, yet we still have complete visibility into each district’s configurations and can modify them whenever we need to. Because the deployment process was so easy, we are definitely looking forward to adding more WatchGuard appliances in the future,” concluded Fred.