Georgia-based Hall County Schools has deployed Dell™ SonicWALL™ SuperMassive™ E10400 Next-Generation Firewalls in High Availability to secure its school district of 26,000 students and 4,800 teachers and staff members. The firewalls will give Hall County Schools the performance and protection needed to drive its “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) and Dell Learning Platform initiatives, developed in collaboration with Intel. With as many as 6,000 to 9,000 mobile devices on its network at any one time, the district required the bandwidth management and load management tools to control the devices more effectively.
Hall County Schools found its previous system cumbersome to manage and lacking the ability to provide visibility into traffic at the application layer. In addition, students had learned to bypass the Web filters and were able to access inappropriate web sites. The Dell SonicWALL SuperMassive E10400 solution was chosen because Hall County required a low-latency firewall that could scale as the district grew. To comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), Hall County Schools used the Dell SonicWALL Content Filtering Service on the SuperMassive E10400. As a result, the school district has saved 50 percent in costs, both in consolidating appliance costs and in reducing overhead of networks administration.
Since it was important to authenticate mobile device users, as well as support the cloud-based Dell Learning Platform, the district also purchased a Dell SonicWALL Aventail E-Class SRA EX9000 solution. Using the Aventail EX9000, Hall County Schools protects its SharePoint investment and enables its teachers to access other schools around the world so that they can teach at multiple locations without leaving the classroom. The district’s remote iPhone and Android users can also use the downloadable SonicWALL Mobile Connect app. The client provides smartphone and tablet users network-level access to academic resources over encrypted SSL VPN connections.
“The fact that Dell SonicWALL is able to back up what it says to the marketplace goes a long way,” said CJ Daab, Technology Support Coordinator, Hall County Schools. “We have a great business relationship with Dell SonicWALL, and its customer service and engineering support is outstanding.”
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