Fortinet Provides UTM to Cook County

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Fortinet® - a pioneer and leading provider of unified threat management (UTM) solutions - today announced that the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, IL, the second largest county by population in the United States, is using Fortinet unified threat management appliances to help protect more than 5.6 million documents ranging from employee email to citizen legal case material, adoptions, mental health, and tax objection documents. The Fortinet system is also helping secure the Circuit Court Clerk’s $5 million “Integrated Cashiering System” which collects and disburses more than $100 million in revenue to the county and its municipalities.

Previously securing their network solely with Norton antivirus software and a Microsoft Windows update server, the Circuit Court Clerk wanted to expand its security protection beyond antivirus and integrate the software-based approach with a hardware-based solution to improve the performance of its network. They turned to System Solutions, Inc. (SSI), an information technology solutions provider, to help identify and select a complete and unified network security solution.

After careful considering, the Circuit Court Clerk selected the Fortinet FortiGate™-1000 enterprise-class multi-threat security appliance to provide antivirus, firewall and intrusion prevention for their network. The Circuit Court Clerk also deployed the Fortinet FortiAnalyzer™-100 to easily analyze and log traffic traversing the network of more than 800 computers.

“We are a very technology dependent county. With so many documents being protected, we can’t risk jeopardizing the safety of information or easily tolerate significant hits to our network. All systems must be secure and up and running at all times,” commented Dorothy Brown, Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County.

“In our first 107 days of having the Fortinet solution deployed, we did not have a second of downtime,” said Bridget Dancy, CIO of Circuit Court of Cook County. “Although we experienced 381,407 attempted attacks against our network, the Fortinet solution blocked and protected us from every single attack.”

Fortinet Inc.