CUSTOMER CASE STUDY FORFAR EDUCATION

Sophos delivers reliable andconsistent cybersecurity tosafeguard pupils, staff andparents at Forfar Education
Forfar Education is a fast-growing group of independent schools locatedaround the UK. The group currently has nine schools in its portfolio, witharound 1,500 pupils supported by 350 members of staff.

CUSTOMER-AT-A-GLANCE
Forfar Education
IndustryEducation
Number of Users
1,500 pupils
350 membersof staff

Sophos Customer
Since 2022
Sophos Solutions
Endpoint – Sophos Intercept X Endpoint
Network – Sophos Firewall

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY FORFAR EDUCATION“Sophos has an excellent track record ineducation and that is immensely reassuring.”
John Forsyth, CEO and Founder, Forfar Education

Forfar Education is a group of independent schools
around the UK with aspirations to achieve further
growth, both in the UK and internationally. Having
recently acquired and added new schools to its
expanding portfolio, the team at Forfar found thateach school had different IT and cybersecurity
technology and varying levels of cyber protection.
Some of the technology had become outdated andpresented a potential risk to data security.
The leadership team therefore made cybersecurity
a key priority in order to meet child safeguarding
obligations and protect data. However, with budget
constraints and only a small internal team tomanage IT across the entire group, Forfar set out
to find a solution that could serve all of its schools’
security protection needs, while being easy to
manage centrally.

Read on to find out why Forfar Education chose
Sophos to provide market-leading cybersecurity forits schools.

Business challenges
As an independent education provider, withestablishments ranging from nurseries to primary
to secondary schools, Forfar Education is boundby a duty of care to its students and their parents,
and the 350 staff who work there. With obligations
around child safeguarding and data protection,
together with combatting the increasing risk andcomplexity of cyber-attacks in education, Forfar
Education identified cybersecurity and access
control as a strategic priority.
As a group of nine schools across the UK, someof which were recently acquired, Forfar Education
found the existing IT and cyber security technology
to be of varying quality, so it needed a coherent,

consistent and comprehensive solution to improveand standardise the security posture of every
school in the group. With budget constraints anda small IT team with limited capacity to manage
cyber threats around the clock, Forfar required asolution that could be easily managed centrally
and provide the peace of mind that students, staff
and data were properly protected. Additionally, as
Forfar has ambitions to expand further, both within
the UK and internationally, the solution would need
to be easily implemented across any new schools
acquired by the group, either within the UK orabroad.
Al Butler, IT Director at Forfar Education, joined thegroup in 2021, and having extensive knowledge
previously of running his own IT services
business, knew that a substantial overhaul of thecybersecurity infrastructure was required. Forfar
would have to completely upgrade and consolidate
its firewalls across all sites and integrate solutions

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY FORFAR EDUCATION“The whole process has gone really smoothly from start to finish. It’s
given us much greater visibility, it’s been easy to manage and we caneasily provide reports for the safeguarding leads at our schools.”
Al Butler, IT Director, Forfar Educationthat would enable the future expansion of the group.
With his wealth of experience but with just a small
team to support him, Al knew that the solution
Forfar selected would have to be manageable withlittle manpower, yet give him, his team, and Forfar
leadership, the peace of mind they needed toensure the group was protected.

The Technical Solution
Al began to research solutions from a numberof providers to help overcome the cybersecurity
challenges Forfar faced. He took part in meetingsand product demos with leading providers to get
visibility of the solutions available on the market,
and how they would be able to provide the highlevels of security Forfar required.
Having evaluated a range of cybersecurity options,
Al and the team at Forfar opted to install Sophos

Firewalls. They chose Sophos for its excellent
reputation within education and beyond, and theability to provide security, consistency and flexibility
for further expansion.
With these new firewalls and the Sophos Central
interface in place, the IT team would have easy
access and visibility across every connected deviceand server, which would provide the reliability andpeace of mind they needed.
The implementation went incredibly smoothly andthe entire project was completed within just one
week in school holidays, with downtime of just afew hours.

Business benefits
Al explains that the benefits of working with
Sophos have been significant for Forfar, not only
for consolidating firewalls and systems across all
sites, providing peace of mind around security andeasing the team’s workload, but also making iteasier to meet its legal and regulatory requirements.
Al explains: “One of the key benefits of the filteringthat’s provided with the Sophos Firewalls is they
enable us to comply with our obligations under thePrevent Duty and the Department for Education’s
statutory guidance ‘Keeping Children Safe inEducation’.” Al listed further benefits as being:CUSTOMER CASE STUDY FORFAR EDUCATION

Ì Minimum disruption to teaching,learning and operations
Ì Enhanced protection and safeguardingfor pupils and staff
Ì Visibility across all devices andservers within the group
Ì Greater access control across devices
Ì Improved visibility and control
through Sophos Central
Ì Peace of mind that legal and regulatory
requirements are being met
Ì The knowledge that any transition to Sophos
solutions in the future will be easy and achievable“I would recommend
Sophos for theirecosystem ofproducts that canbe managed under
one interface, theirproven track record,
and they deliver.”Al Butler, IT Director, Forfar Education

Ì Time savings due to Sophos’s
simple reporting capabilities
Ì A standardized centrally managed firewall
system across all sites, meaning technicians
can focus on what really matters
Forfar Education has been so impressed that it isworking to extend the Sophos solutions it procures.
The team plan to do this by gradually rolling outSophos Central Intercept X Endpoint at each of its
schools as their licences come up for renewal.

To find out more about Sophos
solutions, call (0)8447 671131
or email sales@sophos.com© Copyright 2023 Sophos Ltd. All rights reserved.
Registered in England and Wales No. 2096520, The Pentagon, Abingdon Science Park, Abingdon, OX14 3YP, UKSophos is a registered trademark of Sophos Ltd. All other product and company names mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

2023-07-12 CCS-EN (MP)