case study: summit public schools

tech brief – summer2014 – v1.0

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Case Study: Summit Public Schools

Information on School Summit is a set of six high-performing charter schools in the state of California. 1-2 schools are being added year over year. For the 2015-2016 school year, Summit will expand outside California to Washington State. Bryant Wong (CTO) heads up their IT team and Peter Cazanis is the network admin responsible for web-filtering.

Information on Environment - Every school has a fiber-optic link. Grades 9-12 have access to 500 Mbps of

bandwidth. Smaller schools have up-to 300 Mbps of bandwidth. Being a distributed school system means that Summit does not have a “hub-and-spoke” model unlike other traditional districts.

- Every student in every school has access to a Chromebook. The 2014-2015 school year will see Chromebooks going home with students in one of the schools.

- The reality of having a distributed IT team means that Summit needed as much of their infrastructure in the cloud as possible. They had already eliminated their Active Directory installation and had moved over completely to Google Apps for Education. The only “on-premise” hardware was a Fortinet FireWall and web-filter and Ruckus wireless access points.

Pain-points The existing appliance suffered from a number of drawbacks:

- While the appliance functioned well as a FireWall, the web-filter was causing throughput to drop well below where it needed to be to ensure a good user-experience for the 1:1 program.

- As the Chromebooks started moving home, the school wanted the option to audit and filter those devices even when they moved offsite. Fortigate did not allow this option.

The Securly Solution Securly’s cloud based solution ensured that >99% of the school’s traffic went through the school’s network unimpeded. As a result, bandwidth utilization was where it needed to be. The ability to filter and audit “any device, anywhere” means that Summit is now in a position to measure ROI on their technology initiatives (“How are students using Chromebooks at school vs. home?”).

Results at a Glance - Low maintenance in-the-cloud solution. - High bandwidth utilization. - Ability to filter Chromebooks as they leave the school.