We secured the IT infrastructure of the town of Stod using a comprehensive Fortinet solution

Stod is a town in the Plzeň Region that acts as a municipality with extended powers. It provides public services not only for itself but also for surrounding municipalities, and operates a nursery school and elementary school, among other things. Its history dates back to the 13th century, and today Stod is a lively administrative and cultural center of the region. The municipality of Lelov, with approximately 90 inhabitants, also belongs to the town. Since 2003, Stod has been one of 205 municipalities with a third-level authorized office, which administers 24 municipalities with more than 21,000 inhabitants. The IT infrastructure here must handle the daily operations of the office as well as the demands associated with public institutions and events.

The infrastructure of the town of Stod consisted of several disparate security tools from different suppliers. Antivirus, firewall, email protection, and monitoring all functioned separately, without any interconnection or unified management system. In practice, this meant more complicated incident resolution, time-consuming administration, and an insufficient overview of the current security status.

After five years of operation, the firewall was nearing the end of its service life, the antivirus solution no longer met the requirements of public administration, and email security was limited to only the basic functions built into the mail server. The IT administrator lacked a tool that would allow them to centrally manage key security elements and have up-to-date information in one place.

Significant limitations also appeared in the area of performance. Some important services ran on single-core instances, and the virtualization environment encountered licensing limits, which hindered further development. It was clear that it was necessary to switch to a more scalable and technically advanced solution.

The project was implemented through an open tender. Aricoma's offer based on Fortinet technologies was evaluated as the best.

Cyber security in the town of Stod now forms a single entity. Over the course of three months, a solution was developed that connects network protection, end devices, email communication, and web traffic. Everything is managed from a single console, clearly and efficiently.

The basis is two FortiGate 200F firewalls in high availability mode. If one fails, the other immediately takes over. FortiClient was deployed on end stations, replacing the original antivirus program and enabling central security management across the entire office.

Email communication is now protected by FortiMail VM, deployed in a virtualized environment. It provides advanced protection against phishing, spam, and malicious attachments. The FortiWeb application firewall was deployed for web traffic. FortiManager manages the entire infrastructure, while FortiAnalyzer is used for central monitoring, log collection, and automatic reporting. Thanks to this, the administrator has a continuous overview of the infrastructure and can manage all important security elements from one place.

The solution is designed for a virtualized environment with dozens of servers. The transition to Windows Server Datacenter removed technical limitations and opened up room for further growth. Security updates are delivered immediately, without delay or administrator intervention. The entire system operates on a five-year license and support, which provides the city with long-term stability, visibility, and smooth operation.

Today, the town of Stod operates almost the entire Fortinet Security Fabric security architecture. This means that everything is under one roof, the technologies communicate with each other, the administrator has everything in view, and the response to threats is fast and effective.

The deployed solution also includes FortiIsolator, a technology designed for secure viewing of websites that may pose a threat. Instead of blocking access, it loads content on a remote server and isolates it from the user's device.

The user works with the page in real time, but no malicious code ever reaches their computer or internal network. The page is displayed as if behind invisible glass. The user sees everything, but nothing physically reaches them. The risk is eliminated without restricting normal work.

This technology has only recently been deployed for customers, but it offers surprisingly powerful effects. In a public administration environment, where security is key and working with the web is essential, FortiIsolator is a smart and elegant solution.