The Pittsburgh Steelers are probably the most recognizable American soccer groups, with tens of thousands and thousands of followers tuning into video games and a busy stadium that may maintain greater than 68,000 followers. To assist such a profitable and well-liked franchise, the Steelers require cutting-edge expertise to make sure everybody utilizing their community, together with followers, coaches, and the again workplace, has a quick, seamless, and safe expertise.
The Steelers have labored with Fortinet for greater than 15 years to construct a safe networking deployment that meets their distinctive calls for. What began as a small challenge inside the stadium has grown to handle all layers of community site visitors throughout the stadium, coaching amenities, and company places of work. In actual fact, the Steelers named Fortinet a “Proud Companion” for the 2024–2025 season and plan to deepen their use of the Fortinet Safety Cloth within the coming 12 months to handle their evolving enterprise wants and the more and more refined risk panorama.
I spoke with Scott Phelps, vice chairman of expertise on the Pittsburgh Steelers, to debate how Fortinet and the Fortinet Safety Cloth have improved the fan expertise, streamlined enterprise operations, and contributed to their main protection.
Nirav: What are a number of the greatest safety issues for the Steelers?
Scott: We take care of all method of threats throughout our advanced surroundings, a lot of that are distinctive to being an NFL franchise. For instance, we have to safe all community site visitors inside our stadium, which accommodates tens of hundreds of followers and employees on recreation days. This consists of ticketing programs, concession and merchandise gross sales, and fan connectivity.
Like many companies and industries, our community incorporates extremely aggressive and delicate data. Defending our mental property is precedence primary for me.
Nirav: The Pittsburgh Steelers have been a Fortinet buyer for greater than 15 years. What has led to such a profitable relationship?
Scott: From the start, I’ve been very impressed with the Fortinet workforce’s consideration to element. They actually wished to grasp our community from the within out so they may give our group and followers the most effective expertise attainable. We felt like we had a real companion.
From a expertise perspective, the Fortinet Safety Cloth is an extremely highly effective platform that enables us to converge networking and safety seamlessly. This convergence is exclusive to Fortinet and helped us scale back complexity and forestall gaps in our strategy that may come up when utilizing separate networking and safety options. The Cloth additionally offers us centralized management and visibility throughout our complete surroundings, together with all the brand new operational expertise that’s connecting to the web and feeding into the bigger community.
As a result of Fortinet options are constructed as part of the Fortinet Safety Cloth with the identical working system and administration console, it’s straightforward so as to add new options to handle evolving wants. We began with a small challenge inside our stadium with FortiGate Subsequent-Era Firewalls (NGFWs), and constructing off that platform, we’ve grown to make use of Fortinet options throughout all parts of our surroundings. We use FortiGate NGFWs, FortiAP entry factors, FortiSwitch Ethernet switches, FortiExtender wi-fi WAN gateways, FortiAnalyzer, and FortiMonitor.
Nirav: Are you able to give us some examples of day-to-day actions that the Fortinet Safety Cloth permits?
Scott: What you see on the sector and expertise within the stadium is a results of all of the back-end work of the workforce, enterprise operations, and expertise, together with the Fortinet Safety Cloth. For instance, coaches can share massive recordsdata shortly and securely by the community to organize for video games. Company employees can securely entry delicate information to make enterprise choices. And followers can belief that their fee data is protected once they seize a jersey.
Nirav: What’s subsequent for the Steelers by way of expertise?
Scott: An excellent portion of our season takes place on the street, so it’s essential for personnel, whether or not it’s a coach making ready for an away recreation or a scout reviewing stats for a possible recruit, to have safe entry to privileged assets regardless of the place they’re. The identical could be stated about our management workforce when they aren’t bodily on website. We’re excited to proceed our work with Fortinet to maintain our safety posture in wonderful form.
Be taught extra about how Fortinet powers the Steelers’s community safety.