Enabling Digital Transformation In K-12 Education
Fortinet News, January 16th, 2023
Digital technology promises to revolutionize learning in America's schools by enabling new experiences and improving communication and collaboration among students, teachers, and parents. However, the digital transformation of K-12 education is not without its challenges, as one school district on the U.S. East Coast recently discovered.
The district had made it a priority to roll out a next-generation education platform across its schools and provide devices to all its students. However, this transformation caused a rapid expansion of the network edge, which created significant security gaps in the district's legacy systems and management infrastructure. The infrastructure was also showing signs of age. For example, it faced some failures on its wireless access points, and service support contracts were set to expire.
Resourcing was also an issue. The district has only one primary engineer to support IT across all its schools, and much of his time was spent mitigating issues on network infrastructure point products. The IT engineer identified the need for a single network platform for ease of management, remediation, automation, and control.