St Aidan's & St Margaret's Challenges Before Assure & FortiGate
Before choosing Saasyan Assure, teachers, school leaders and pastoral care teams at St Aidan's & St Margaret's schools could only access reports based on data that was weeks old and did not allow for an in-depth look at web usage information. Additionally, generating these reports required the assistance of the IT Support team and were cumbersome to use.
The schools recognised the importance of deploying enterprise-grade, next-generation firewall infrastructure to protect the schools’ networks from sophisticated attacks and intrusion attempts. The Fortinet FortiGate firewall was cost-effective and provided the schools with excellent web filtering and advanced threat protection.
With this understanding, the schools sought a simple-to-use and comprehensive self-service reporting and alerting system to monitor student web usage on a real-time basis. They also wanted dashboard visualisation to view internet usage and the solution needed to be designed to integrate seamlessly with their Fortinet firewall.
How Did Saasyan Assure & Fortinet FortiGate Help St Aidan's & St Margaret's Schools?
Saasyan Assure presents St Aidan’s and St Margaret’s staff with a user-friendly web-based interface providing valuable student internet usage information in real-time. This management dashboard presents a holistic view of online behaviour including visibility into where students are spending their time on the internet, with drill-down access to precisely view the websites, videos, and other online applications and services students are visiting.
‘Assure has been a great find for us. It surfaces a lot of very pertinent information we previously were not able to see.’
Greg Anderson, Chief Information Officer, St Aidan's and St Margaret's
Assure also provides staff with a simple and reliable system to create and schedule reports without IT assistance. The self-service reports have resulted in a significant reduction in IT workload, and costs savings.
In combination with the Fortigate enterprise-grade firewall, Assure also creates
actionable insights via email alerts to appropriate staff. These alerts are forwarded
when the system detects worrisome chats, attempted access of unsavoury websites, or searches for inappropriate content. This proactive information assists pastoral care staff to ensure the online safety of students.
‘Saasyan Assure allows our staff to easily generate reports that are immediately available.’
Greg Anderson
Importantly, Assure also facilitates teacher and guidance officer conversations
with students to review how they are spending their time, enabling evidence-based
counselling sessions, leading to improved student learning outcomes.
Benefits St Aidan's & St Margaret's Schools Gained
With challenges to tackle, St. Aidan's & St Margaret's School gained several benefits from deploying Saasyan Assure with their best-in-class firewalls from Fortinet:
- Enhanced Student Welfare
Proactive counselling of students enabled by providing real-time actionable insights and alerts like potential cyberbullying incidents. - Improved learning outcomes
Reduced access to inappropriate web content and easier access to class-related learning content - Increased efficiency for school leaders and wellbeing team
Simple access to meaningful web usage reports to monitor whole-of-school, year-group or individual students - Productivity gains for IT management
Reduced time spent exporting data and creating reports. - Good stewardship of funds
Capitalised on the existing investment in Fortinet next-generation enterprise-grade firewall infrastructure
About St Aidan's and St Margaret's Schools
St Aidan’s and St Margaret’s are Anglican Girls Schools located near the heart of Brisbane with 1,800 students across two campuses. The Schools have a rich history spanning more than 100 years and share information technology and business functions.
