E-Rate iboss FWaaS for Schools & Libraries

The E-Rate iboss Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) for Schools & Libraries is a cloud-centric solution for K-12 educational institutions. It offers advanced threat protection, cloud app firewall monitoring, intrusion prevention, antimalware defense, and DNS security. This solution ensures military-grade cybersecurity standards while offering unparalleled savings through the E-Rate program. It also provides school districts with the ability to decommission traditional on-premises appliances and move beyond traditional Next Gen Firewall (NGFW) products and services. The platform currently supports over two thousand school districts including the largest districts in the U.S. iboss ZTE FWaaS platform offers advanced threat protection (ATP), cloud app firewall and monitoring, an intrusion prevention system (IPS), advanced antimalware defense, and Domain Name System (DNS) security.

Unlike legacy on-premises firewall appliances or Next Gen Firewall (NGFW) products, the iboss FWaaS operates on a cloud platform. This deployment allows for more flexible ease of deployment and ensures a unified security policy, regardless of where students access the internet.

As school data, applications, and services transition from traditional data centers to the cloud, exposure to potential threats increases. A cloud-centric approach like iboss FWaaS adapts to this paradigm shift, ensuring that students and district employees remain protected outside the school’s physical perimeter.

E-Rate program covers up to 85% of the costs of the iboss FWaaS solution. This benefit means schools and libraries only cover 15% of the total cost, allowing them to access advanced firewall technology at a fraction of the usual expenses.

First, schools submit the FCC Form 470 for bids. After evaluating bids and selecting iboss, schools pay as little as just 15% of the invoice. Afterward, they collaborate with iboss to finalize documentation, confirm service initiation, and E-Rate handles the remainder of the payment.

The iboss platform includes standard CIPA filtering capabilities, ensuring schools maintain a safe and compliant learning environment.

The iboss FWaaS provides consistent policy management across all students, ensuring that each device, on or off campus, adheres to CIPA requirements and school cybersecurity policies.

iboss FWaaS elevates a school’s cybersecurity posture to military-grade standards. It monitors, detects, and mitigates threats, safeguarding vital educational data from cyber-attacks.

Schools and Libraries can secure the reduced price for up to five years, ensuring stable budgeting without unexpected cost increases.

IT administrators or individuals responsible for network and cybersecurity in K-12 schools are the ideal contacts. They’ll have the insight and authority to evaluate and implement such solutions to benefit their institutions.

School District applications, data and services have mostly moved from the school datacenter to the cloud, making them easily accessible by attackers. Perimeter-based security measures, such as legacy on-prem firewall appliances, or NGFWs, are quickly becoming obsolete and incapable of protecting students, district employees, and applications. Now, with iboss ZTE FWaaS for Education, School Districts are connected to a single global firewall with a unified ZTE application-aware security policy, allowing districts to implement an enterprise cybersecurity FWaaS solution.

Security Policy Deployed via the Cloud from a Single Edge

• A single firewall distributed across an organization’s sites and users that enforces consistent policy for all
• Transitions Costs to an Operating Expense Consumption Model
• Eliminates the need for purchasing (CAPEX), installing, and maintaining appliances in your datacenter
• Reduce costs and improve efficiency
• Scalability and Flexibility
• Scales the firewall to your organization’s size and locations quickly. iboss cloud edges remain close to your users to protect your resources
• Consolidate solutions to reduce cost and strain on the technology teams’ resources while increasing visibility on at risk and high-risk students through one unified policy and reporting platform

• The iboss cloud provides full firewall protection for users regardless of location, including Intrusion Prevention, connection tracking, as well as IP and Port blocking
• The iboss containerized architecture extends firewall protection to users at all times to ensure fast and secure connections to cloud applications and resources
• The iboss cloud’s containerized architecture allows stream-based data to be processed even when users are remote. Full firewall IPS is supported, including the ability to use existing IPS signature subscriptions
• The iboss Cloud Connectors can transparently tunnel data directly from user devices to the iboss cloud for firewall protection, as data flows through iboss cloud, firewall security is applied to the streams to ensure compliance and security
• For PCI compliance, the need to block IP Addresses and ports is critical. The iboss cloud provides these critical capabilities and extends the features so they can be dynamically applied to users or groups dynamically. IP ranges and port ranges are supported in combination with user identity.

• Filing of FCC Form 470 can start July to mid-February.
• FCC Form 471 window opens in January and closes in late March.
• Funding Commitment Decision Letters are issued from April-August with the FCC Form 486 window open to file.
• Funding is Disbursed from July-September.

For existing customers reach out to your customer success engineer, for new customers reach out to iboss at [email protected] to book a briefing to learn how easy it is to use E-Rate to procure iboss FWaaS this E-Rate season.