Trumbull Public Schools is a highly rated, public school district located in southwestern Connecticut. Trumbull has 6,600 students in grades PK, K-12 with a student-teacher ratio of 15 to 1.
Educational technology and the infrastructure to support and protect 10,000 wired and wireless end user devices is challenging for any organization or CIO. Trumbull Public School administrators were increasingly concerned about cybersecurity as growing internet usage and the growing number of devices has exposed teacher and student devices to botnets, malware and viruses from bad actors. Trumbull Public Schools turned to Digital BackOffice, a district business partner of 18 years located in Milford, CT. DBO currently manages the fiber optic wide area network between ten (10) district school buildings and provides help desk support and consulting to the Trumbull PS information technology department. Trumbull Director of Technology, Jeff Hackett and a small staff are responsible for end user support, network infrastructure, server-based applications, cloud services and security.
When its legacy firewalls were due for upgrades, Mr. Hackett consulted with Digital BackOffice on a next generation firewall solution for the school district to replace older Cisco ASA firewalls. The DBO team recommended a Palo Alto Next Gen firewall and TRAPS endpoint security to identify and prevent malicious activity and improve network throughput. “Palo Alto offered an integrated approach to security with a cloud connected service called Wildfire, which updates threat definitions in real-time preventing zero-day malware attacks”, said Mr. Hackett.
“We’re realizing major benefits from the Palo Alto Networks platform”, said Mr. Hackett. “Preventing malware activity at the perimeter and the endpoint allows our IT staff to do other things instead of spending time chasing down infected devices and reinstalling software. We’ve more than doubled our network throughput without adding additional, costly bandwidth.”
The Digital BackOffice team planned the cutover to minimize downtime and disruption to users by mirroring configurations from the older firewall. “We were very satisfied with the cutover and the managed services that DBO continues to provide for Palo Alto Networks products. The Palo Alto Networks platform and the DBO managed services protect our students and employees with minimal impact on district staff time and internal resources. We’re very pleased with the solutions provided by Digital BackOffice,” adds Mr. Hackett.
