Hopewell City Public Schools adopts cloud-first strategy with iboss
Learn how Hopewell City Public Schools keeps students safe while innovating with iboss cloud
Hopewell City Public Schools Case Study
Download the complete case study to see how Hopewell City Public Schools implemented cloud-first security across 7 campuses.
Key Statistics
Overview
Hopewell City Public Schools provide educational programs for approximately 4,200 students and is the first school system in Virginia that moved to a year-round schedule in July 2021. This innovative approach incorporates a balanced calendar to address student needs, such as focused learning and enrichment programs. With seven campuses including three elementary schools, one middle school, one high school and a learning center, Hopewell's staff aims every day to provide students with a quality education that will serve them well long after high school.
Hopewell City Public Schools's Challenge
At Hopewell City Public Schools, students come first across its seven campuses that serve kids from two years old through high school. A district that continually embraces innovation, Hopewell incorporated year-round schooling with a balanced calendar during the 2021-2022 school year. Keeping students and staff safe while online became paramount as COVID-19 affected the entire community in 2020.
The pandemic forced Hopewell to reimagine how IT manages resources in a traditional school environment as students quickly needed support with devices that were filtered and safe for remote use. As the district maintains a one-to-one device policy for every Hopewell student, they wanted to find a solution quickly. Kris Reed, Supervisor of Technology, explains their mission: 'We always want the kids to have the best environment possible when it comes to technology.' His team maintains the network, software and hardware systems while ensuring safety, visibility into remote student access and compliance with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). The COVID pandemic presented a unique opportunity for Hopewell to quickly embrace a cloud-first strategy.
Hopewell City Public Schools's iboss Solution
Hopewell City Public Schools have been using iboss to keep its 6,200 students and staff secure for approximately ten years. During the height of the pandemic in April 2020, the district migrated from iboss' on-prem offering to the iboss Cloud Platform when the entire student population moved to remote school learning. Although Hopewell was already considering a cloud-first strategy, the pandemic incentivized Kris and his team to immediately migrate to iboss cloud to ensure students and staff would have safe online access from home and other remote locations.
The redundancy of the cloud and removing the gateway appliance from the network inspired Kris Reed to migrate Hopewell to the iboss Cloud Platform. 'Getting rid of that single point of failure and moving to the cloud makes our network stronger. It's never going down,' he explains. His team eliminated data backhaul and significantly reduced its data center footprint while improving mobile user security. When Hopewell's seven different sites turned into thousands during the pandemic as students and staff worked from home, the district's technology team was able to secure any type of environment with the iboss SASE Cloud Platform.
In Hopewell, we stress innovation and forward thinking. At iboss, they don't just produce an amazing product, they fit our mindset of being innovative and forward thinking with the educational community and they align with our mission of kids first.
Key Results for Hopewell City Public Schools
- iboss Cloud Platform helps Hopewell maintain priority to keep students safe while online
- 6,200 students and staff can work more efficiently with increased security regardless of location
- Seamlessly adjusted to network security challenges after COVID-19 pandemic
- Small IT department can spend more time on school initiatives and helping teachers
- Students have the resources they need with proper filtering and safety measures
Highlights
- Cloud-first strategy – Adopting the iboss cloud SASE platform provides a cost-effective and scalable solution for 6,200 students and staff
- Innovation throughout the school district – Hopewell will seamlessly benefit from the iboss offering as it moves to a year-round learning environment
- Equity and safety within and outside the classroom – Every student has access to a device for home/remote use that is properly filtered and safe
- Elimination of proxy/gateway appliances – Move to the cloud and remove physical hardware strengthens and secures the Hopewell network
- Ten-year iboss partnership with seamless migration from on-prem to cloud during pandemic crisis response
- CIPA compliance maintained regardless of student or staff location with granular reporting and SSL decryption visibility
The granular reporting and increased visibility via SSL decryption on all traffic associated with our devices is amazing. The flexibility of secure connectivity as a service ensures that we are CIPA compliant no matter where our students are learning or our staff is working.