FortiClient Rescue: City of Santa Ana

CASE STUDY  |  SLED PORTFOLIO

Municipal Government  |  Orange County, CA  |  AirGap Labs

FortiClient Rescue: City of Santa Ana

Custom MSI package built, tested, tuned, and delivered in one day - the day before Thanksgiving - rescuing a stalled FortiClient deployment for Orange County's third-largest city.

310K+

Residents served by Santa Ana - 3rd most populous city in Orange County

1 day

Total turnaround from SOW execution to delivery

Same day

MSI build, test, and tune cycles completed within a single business day

Day before Thanksgiving

Engaged with no flexibility on the delivery deadline

The Challenge

The City of Santa Ana had deployed Fortinet's FortiClient endpoint security platform - but the deployment had stalled. The core problem was packaging: FortiClient requires a properly configured Microsoft Installer (MSI) package for enterprise-wide deployment across managed endpoints. Santa Ana did not have the internal tooling or expertise to generate a valid, customized MSI package. Without it, the deployment could not progress, leaving city endpoints in an unprotected state.

MSI packaging for FortiClient is a specialized DevSecOps task - it sits at the intersection of endpoint security configuration, Windows installer engineering, and enterprise deployment tooling. Most IT teams, including those in well-resourced city governments, do not have this capability in-house. This gap appears more often than the Fortinet ecosystem publicly acknowledges.

AirGap Labs received the call the day before Thanksgiving. The city needed the problem solved before the holiday. This meant the full engagement - scoping, SOW execution, MSI build, testing, tuning, and delivery - had to be completed within a single business day, against a hard deadline set by the calendar rather than the complexity of the work.

The AirGap Labs Response

DevSecOps capability deployed immediately. AirGap Labs brought its in-house DevSecOps team to bear from the moment the engagement was confirmed. The team had the tooling to generate, configure, and customize FortiClient MSI packages natively - capability that Santa Ana lacked and that most Fortinet resellers do not maintain internally.

Environment-specific build - not a generic package. The MSI package was customized to Santa Ana's environment: endpoint configuration profiles, policy settings, deployment parameters, and integration with the city's existing management infrastructure. A generic package would have created new problems during deployment. A customized one could be pushed to endpoints at scale with confidence.

Full lifecycle in one day: SOW to delivery. AirGap Labs scoped the work, executed a Statement of Work, built the custom MSI package, ran it through testing and tuning cycles to validate behavior across representative endpoint configurations, and delivered the final package - all within a single day.

No shortcuts on testing. It would have been faster to deliver a build that had not been validated. AirGap Labs did not take that shortcut. The city needed a package it could deploy at scale with confidence - not one it would troubleshoot across hundreds of endpoints after the fact.

Solution Deployed

FortiClient

Endpoint Security & Zero-Trust Network Access

Custom MSI package built, tested, and delivered by AirGap Labs DevSecOps. Environment-specific configuration for enterprise-wide deployment across city endpoints. Full build-test-tune lifecycle completed in under 24 hours.

Outcomes

  • Custom FortiClient MSI package built, tested, tuned, and delivered within a single day - the day before Thanksgiving - resolving a deployment blocker the city could not address internally.
  • Full SOW-to-delivery lifecycle completed in under 24 hours, demonstrating AirGap Labs' ability to mobilize DevSecOps capability at emergency speed for public sector clients with no flexibility on timing.
  • City of Santa Ana FortiClient deployment unblocked and positioned for enterprise-wide rollout across municipal infrastructure serving 310,000 residents.
  • In-house MSI packaging capability validated as a differentiating service offering in the Fortinet SLED channel - a gap that appears consistently across government deployments and that most partners cannot fill internally.

Partner Perspective

The FortiClient MSI packaging gap is a known friction point in Fortinet endpoint deployments, and it falls in an awkward place: too specialized for most city IT teams, too operational for a standard reseller, and not the kind of thing that shows up clearly in a pre-sales conversation. By the time a client realizes they need it, the deployment is already stalled. AirGap Labs built this capability internally because it keeps coming up. The City of Santa Ana did not need a proposal or a roadmap. They needed the problem solved before Thanksgiving. That is what we delivered.

AirGap Labs is a Fortinet Engage Preferred Services Partner based in Irvine, CA, with in-house DevSecOps capability spanning custom MSI packaging, endpoint deployment engineering, multi-cloud integration, and Fortinet platform architecture.

airgaplabs.com

Irvine, CA  |  Fortinet Engage Preferred Services Partner
Back to blog