WatchGuard Joins with Conpute to Provide High-Performance Network Security for Over 70,000 Canadian Students

Seattle, WA - September 20, 2007. WatchGuard® Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of security appliances and unified threat management (UTM) solutions, announced today that Durham District School Board in Whitby, Ontario, Canada has selected WatchGuard to safeguard its computer network. The network, which serves 70,901 students and 7,269 staff members, connects the main offices in Whitby with 106 elementary schools and 26 high schools and learning centers throughout the Regional Municipality of Durham.

In selecting and deploying the WatchGuard unified threat management network security solution, the Durham District worked closely with Conpute, a WatchGuard Expert Partner headquartered in Oshawa, Ontario, who reviewed the district's infrastructure and helped determine the optimum combination of products. After a year of working with Conpute and WatchGuard to design and test the system, Durham District School Board selected Conpute's WatchGuard solution as the best choice to protect the district's network.

Where security has typically been an issue of keeping external threats away from the network and protecting student information, schools have seen a significant shift to include the protection of private information and network integrity from users within the network. This issue is a serious reality for the K-12 educational space. "The students of today are able to use and manipulate technology to exploit system weaknesses and gain access to restricted information," said Don Conaby, president of Conpute. "With increased dependencies and availability of WAN services at the Durham District's network, there was an increased risk for outbreaks spreading throughout the district as well as students having access to other schools' networks, and even the main education center. The solution that we architected placed a WatchGuard unified threat management (UTM) firewall at each location with centralized management."

The district-wide installation included the following combination of WatchGuard Firebox® X firewall/VPN security appliances:

118 – Firebox X550e UTM appliances
13 – Firebox X750e UTM appliances
1 – Firebox X1250e UTM appliance
2 – Firebox X8500e-F UTM appliances (with fiber optic interfaces)

This solution provides Durham District with full proxy firewall capabilities at each location to prevent attacks from outside of the network as well as viruses, worms, or spyware brought in knowingly or unknowingly by internal users. In addition, Durham District chose to add WatchGuard's suite of security services to help boost protection in critical attack areas, including anti-spam, anti-virus, intrusion prevention, and web content filtering. "The content filtering from WatchGuard is compatible with Active Directory allowing the Durham Board to create separate policies for teachers and students," explained Terry Buchanan, vice president and CTO of Conpute. "As an integral component of the solution, this allows the Durham Board to enforce stricter web security policies for students, while allowing teachers and administration the flexibility they need for delivering lessons, research, and content downloading."

The solution's real-time monitoring component allows IT administrators to troubleshoot problems instantaneously and make certain that they are diagnosing the correct issues. Durham also opted to upgrade to Fireware® Pro advanced appliance software on all appliances for the redundancy and traffic shaping capabilities their complex network required.

"We evaluated products from other security vendors, but Conpute's WatchGuard solution provided the complete package we were looking for," said Wilson Chan, IT director for the Durham School District. "The visibility we now have into our network security infrastructure and policies is impressive. We can see exactly what's happening at all times and take preventive or corrective action accordingly."

"We are very excited about the opportunity to solve some important problems for the Durham School District. We have a high level of confidence that we could meet both their security and networking needs," said Bill Smith, VP of sales at WatchGuard Technologies. "After all, this is what our products were designed to do, and it's refreshing to see them outperform less effective, more expensive competitive offerings. We have architected our products from the ground up with one thing in mind: securing networks with reliable and efficient solutions."

About Conpute
Conpute, a solution services company, was established in 1983. As a full service IT infrastructure provider, Conpute offers flexibility and ease in the way their clients work together including procurement, break fix, proactive network support and project based consulting. Specializing in IT Infrastructure, Conpute delivers solutions in managed services, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), wireless broadband, data center and procurement. Headquartered in Ontario, the company delivers service to its clients locally in most major centers across North America. For more information, please visit www.conpute.com.

About WatchGuard
Since 1996, WatchGuard Technologies has provided reliable, easy to manage security appliances to hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. Our Firebox X family of unified threat management (UTM) solutions provides the best combination of strong, reliable, multi-layered security with the best ease of use in its class. All products are backed by LiveSecurity® Service, a ground-breaking support and maintenance program. WatchGuard is a privately owned company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America. For more information, please visit www.watchguard.com.