School Gives a High Grade to WatchGuard for Compliance and Network Protection
Challenge
Founded in 2017, Rugby School Thailand is a British international day and boarding school in Pattaya, Thailand. Rugby School accommodates over 800 students, ranging from those who are on-site for most of the week, including day-boarders, weekly boarders, as well as full-board students. With a focus of “Whole Person, Whole Point,” Rugby School strives to encourage students to fulfil their academic potential while exploring their wider interests through extracurricular activities.
The school has always used WatchGuard solutions since it was founded in 2017 and originally evaluated WatchGuard compared to Palo Alto and Sophos. They found that WatchGuard was the vendor that best met the compliance regulations for Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA), providing secured day-to-day teaching and learning, as well as other online operations, and guaranteeing safe web access to all school stakeholders. Rugby School also implements WatchGuard solutions for institution-wide wireless coverage, the student learning device program, VOIP, and access control capabilities.
Solution
In order to achieve compliance regulations, Rugby School looked to install WatchGuard Firebox M570 and M4800, complete with WatchGuard’s Dimension reporting and management solution, with the help of their partner, RICOH Limited. Both firewall solutions are also running Total Security Suite – a bundle of services that provide the maximum protection against the latest threats that includes Application Control, Gateway AntiVirus, Intrusion Protection Service (IPS), APT Blocker, DNSWatch and IntelligentAV. “We worked closely with our partner to deploy the WatchGuard Firebox M570 and M4800 solutions since it met all of our compliance needs and overall was easy to install. Dimension is great too since we can see what happens on the network in real time. In a school with over 800 students, having a security solution that is both protected from the latest threats and provides students with safe access to the Internet is critical,” explains Eric Ho, director of IT.
Results
With both the WatchGuard Firebox M570 and M4800 equipped with Total Security Suite, Rugby School meets all the PDPA compliance regulations and at the same time is always able to actively monitor their school’s network more efficiently. Eric concludes, “The service we received from our partner is top notch. It was easy to negotiate with our partner since they have been so proactive in getting the best deals for us. Not to mention, our school’s WatchGuard security solution checks all the boxes for the PDPA compliance regulations. Plus, the fact that our solutions come with Dimension has overall reduced the time it takes for our team to identify and diagnose any events on our network.”