Home to both scenic and cultural points of interest, Ada County comprises six cities in southwestern Idaho, including the state’s capital, Boise. With a population of over 440,000, Ada County is the most populous county in the state and home to 11 government departments and seven elected offices.
Because of its size, Ada County government was challenged with enabling a wide range of network access privileges while protecting vital network assets and private taxpayer information. Moreover, achieving unencumbered access to private network services, as well as public websites, was difficult because their previous vendor’s port-and-protocol approach to security was not sophisticated enough to handle today’s more advanced threats.
In order to improve the organization’s security posture across all departments, Ada County government elected to deploy the Palo Alto Networks Security Operating Platform, with granular application- and user-based policy management and comprehensive cyberthreat prevention, across the network and endpoint devices.
This deployment included multiple PA-3060, PA-3050 and PA-3020 next-generation firewalls, including subscriptions to Threat Prevention, URL Filtering, WildFire, Traps, AutoFocus, Panorama and Premium Support.
Ada County government was pleased to see the following results:
- An integrated, prevention-based approach to network security and endpoint protection.
- Prevention of known and unknown threats from compromising network assets and private information.
- Endpoints protected from malicious exploits, stopping 52 attempts in the first month of deployment.
- Eliminated lost employee productivity by stopping stealthy ransomware, such as Bad Rabbit.
- Simplified policy management for diverse departmental access requirements.
- Centralized event logging and integrated trend analysis to continually refine prevention strategy.
Pleased with the security enhancements gained by the Palo Alto Networks Security Operating Platform, IT Security Engineer Bret Lopeman says:
"The Palo Alto Networks platform brought us a solid, application-aware environment that we could tie in to people instead of a PC on a desk and [lets us] automatically prevent threats from getting through instead of reacting after the fact."
Read the rest of the Ada County government case study to learn more.