Lycée Louis Massignon strengthens its Security to Keep Students and Staff Safe Online with Fortinet

Fortinet, a global leader in broad, integrated, and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced that Lycée Louis Massignon (LLM) relies on the Fortinet Security Fabric to improve its security infrastructure and keep its students and staff safe online.

Located in Abu Dhabi, Lycée Louis Massignon educates more than 1700 pupils from pre KinderGarten (3 years old) to high school (18 years old). Certified by the French Ministry of National Education, this plurilingual school offers excellent academic program and results and is a gateway to the best French and international universities.

The school had to comply with their Internal Education Auditing Team as they store a significant amount of sensitive data ranging from financial to personal information. To better meet compliance requirements, mitigate chances of data leaks, keep student safe on the web, and preserve LLM’s reputation and credibility, the school decided to improve its security infrastructure to keep up with the increase in volume of threats and the sophisticated cyber threat landscape. “Our former solution was unstable and incapable of blocking inappropriate websites,” says Christope Hammami, IT Manager at Lycée Louis Massignon.

LLM was looking for a secure solution that will keep them secure and ahead of the threats, could be centrally managed, reduce operational overhead and offer unified visibility and control of the entire security and network. After evaluating several offerings in the market, the school opted for the Fortinet Security Fabric approach which combines protection across the entire attack surface and cycle with unified management and orchestration, market leading AI-powered security services, granular control, and centralized compliance capabilities. FortiGate next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) supporting secure sockets layer (SSL) inspection (including TLS1.3), with natively integrated FortiGuard cloud delivered web filtering, and advanced intrusion prevention (IPS)were deployed in the LLM infrastructure, reducing complexity by consolidating multiple point products into one Security Fabric.

Another part of the solution is the deployment of FortiSwitches, which are managed through the FortiGate NGFW, offering a seamless experience when connecting to wired and wireless networks for both students and staff. Lastly, FortiAnalyzer has provided analytics and automation to provide better detection and response against cyber threats while streamlining SOC operations.
“Right after the implementation was completed, we have experienced unified management and an ease of operation. In more general terms, we have much more confidence in our security infrastructure. Fortinet’s team was really supportive and attentive to understand our pain points and recommend the best solutions,” concludes Christope Hammami, IT Manager at Lycée Louis Massignon.
“Education institutions are amongst the most targeted sectors by cybercriminals, owning to several key factors caused by things like cost constraints, overburdened IT team, and legacy systems,” said Alain Penel, Regional Vice President – Middle East, Fortinet. “With technology being one of the most critical components of 21st-century education, LLM have taken a step in the right direction to reinforce their security posture as it undergoes a security transformation to protect its students and faculty against the constantly expanding attack surface.”