St. Agnes’ Parish
Fortinet Network and Security Solutions Enable Nonprofit to Serve the Community Better
Download Case StudySt. Agnes’ Parish is an Australian Catholic nonprofit that provides home care, respite care, early education, and food services, as well as running churches and retirement communities. The organization needed a way to improve its digital technology and integrate new OT devices to better support its community, while increasing the overall resilience and security of its network and systems.
Working through a managed security services provider (MSSP), St. Agnes’ Parish has deployed FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs), FortiAP access points, and FortiSwitch secure Ethernet switches. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN connects the organization’s 25 sites, with FortiExtender providing backup broadband connections. FortiManager, the centralized management solution for the Fortinet Security Fabric, ties these solutions together. St. Agnes’ Parish uses the FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services to further protect its systems. With Fortinet, St. Agnes’ Parish has the converged networking and security foundation it needs to deliver the best possible care to its community, while operating with greater flexibility and resilience.
“The whole goal of St. Agnes’ Parish is the work of delivering care, and innovative technology enables us to do that work better. Fortinet and Ip.Glass have helped my team move from ‘No, we can’t’ to ‘Yes, we can.”
– Nev Finch, Manager Information and Communication Systems, St. Agnes’ Parish
Network availability optimized, thanks to SD-WAN support for multiple communications providers and seamless failover in case of an outage
Improved network and security stack
Better visibility into network and security enables IT team to remediate vulnerabilities they did not previously know about
Streamlined rollout of networking and security hardware
Greater organizational flexibility to expand when an opportunity arises to provide new services to the Port Macquarie community
We are 24 × 7. We have data coming in and out all day long. We have referrals from external sources that come into our environment, and it's all electronic medical record systems …. I can't afford to not have these systems up. It's a matter of life or death with a lot of the work that we do.”
- Aaron Fields, Chief Information Officer, St. Ann’s Community
We have a nursing home, rehab hospitals, and home health agencies. They need service 24 hours a day. And we have been getting hit with a lot of hurricanes and other disruptions, where the lines get wet, and the main internet service goes down. We really needed SD-WAN, because we are nonprofit, so we do not have a lot of funding, and we have to pick and choose the equipment and services we get.”
- Sheikh Arshed, Director of Information Security and IT Operations, Catholic Health Services