Case Study: Torrance Unified School District
California school district invests in cybersecurity and automates processes to drive efficiency
About our customer
Torrance Unified School District, part of Los Angeles County, consists of 17 elementary, eight middle, four high schools, and one continuation and one alternative high school. The District also has three adult school campuses. The District serves the entire City of Torrance and is governed by five school board members. Their mission is to ensure that every student is educated and prepared to succeed in life and become lifelong learners who will be contributing members of a global society.
“Working with the Ricoh team has been incredible. We were able to modernize our operations with Laserfiche, making life easier with workflow automation. Efficiency, accuracy and productivity have grown to support our community, students, family and staff.”
— Gil Mara
Chief Education Technology and Information Services Officer
Torrance Unified School District
Challenge
Legacy equipment in the district print shop
Decentralized boxes, document files and cabinets that were not easily accessible and taking up space
Manual processing of student, employee and human resources documents
Dynamically preventing ransomware attacks
Originally, the Torrance Unified School District worked with Ricoh to use multifunction printers (MFPs), which expanded by adding printers into classrooms. Being a large district with 34 schools to support, their print shop needed renovation with more modern equipment that could handle multiple formats and media, including wide-format banners and signs in addition to the variety of other fliers, communications, records and forms typically used in schools.
The District also wanted to digitize its massive amount of records, which were stored in filing cabinets, boxes, microfiche and even had dedicated storage rooms. Much of the documents and processes were done manually, so searching for any documentation was time-consuming. Additionally, handwritten documents were often hard to decipher and therefore, sometimes prone to errors. As a public institution, they are mandated to keep records, so they knew an efficient, centralized, digital location would work easier for employees and better serve their students and families. Digital transformation for schools was essential.
Simultaneously, the rise of cybersecurity threats, attacks and breaches became increasingly complex and sophisticated. The District knew that prevention was critical to protecting the community.
The strong 20-year relationship between the District and Ricoh enabled a straightforward and painless path forward for Ricoh to help modernize the District’s equipment, technology and processes.
Solution
“Ransomware Containment saved us from being hacked.”
— Gil Mara, Chief Education Technology and Information Services Officer, Torrance Unified School District
Revitalized and expanded the print shop with a variety of more modern and flexible printers
Deployed Laserfiche enterprise content management
Digitized documents for purchasing, special education, human resources and students
Fortified cybersecurity precautions with BullWall Ransomware Containment
Ricoh recommended new printers with more sophisticated technology in different formats to support signage and banners. Ricoh’s Managed Services team also provided equipment training. Now, printing is efficient and can scale its usage for printing mixed media. Schools now have an online portal where teachers and staff can place orders, resulting in reduced costs, improved accuracy and increased productivity. “In the last two years, the print shop has completed 1,330 jobs, of which 210 were wide format. It’s been a very busy and successful operation there,” explained Gil Mara, Chief Educational Technology and Information Services Officer.
Laserfiche was selected as the enterprise content management system and central repository. The Ricoh team worked diligently to scan rooms, boxes and microfiche into digital formats for different departments. Purchasing has its central place for purchase orders, requisitions and contracts with embedded document retention policies. The Special Education department often has hundreds of pages of documents and records for each student, so digitizing these documents and using pre-built templates alleviated space and search time. Between Human Resources, Purchasing and Special Education departments, the repository contains tens of thousands of scanned documents, which reduces the storage footprint greatly.
Laserfiche Forms was enabled for Independent Service Contracts, which streamlined the contract process. Additionally, the Ricoh team integrated the platform with the school’s existing Power School student information system.
The District also had a proactive cybersecurity approach in place, including quarterly simulated phishing attempts to train their staff to be vigilant. Leading technology and information services, Mara knew that wasn’t enough: “We can’t employ enough people to sit there looking at all of this. We’ve got to automate our response time, our responses, and our monitoring of our system.”
Rapid technological advances being leveraged by attackers also played into ongoing security concerns. “With the advent of generative AI, and now hackers being able to leverage AI tools to write code and enhance their attacks, it’s more imperative that we have something in place,” explained Mara. With the approval of district leadership, Mara expedited the deployment of BullWall Ransomware Containment.
Results
Expansion and modernization of print shop
Automation of documents and records increased data accuracy, time savings and funding
Upskilled staff to become enrolment and data processing techs
BullWall protected the District and kept operations running smoothly
Digital transformation for schools enhanced security and streamlined processes
The print shop continues to flourish with streamlined print jobs. The Laserfiche platform automated the workflow of documents and records. With online enrolment and a centralized repository, data entry is minimized, data accuracy has increased, and enrolment has grown — which increases government funding for the school. The current staff was retrained to use the enrolment solution and work with data instead of inputting data manually.
Within a month of the BullWall deployment, a District employee received an email with an attachment from her son’s doctor’s office. Since she was expecting this document, she downloaded it — not realizing it was a malicious file that began infecting her computer.
Ransomware immediately went to work and locked down the infected device, blocking the employee’s access to the rest of the network. BullWall’s real-time visibility into file transactions and movement allowed the District’s IT team to gain insight into the attack, providing critical information for a swift response. The automated containment response was ready to act, further reducing the potential damage. “Ransomware Containment saved us from being hacked,” stated Mara.
“We don’t know how bad this would’ve been had it executed itself,” Mara shared. Instead, the infected computer and account were immediately disabled, preventing further harm. Most importantly, there was no loss of data or encryption of files. BullWall proved invaluable when the real-time monitoring and automated response capabilities not only thwarted a potentially devastating attack but also provided peace of mind.
The future is bright for Torrance Unified School District — their data is secured, document and records processes are automated, accessible and in compliance, and there are more opportunities to grow and make operational improvements.