Palo Alto Networks

While the organization had a mix of locations (hybrid: premise and cloud), it was looking for highly automated prevention that safely enables all applications and protects against all known, advanced threats. At the same time, it was equally important to be prepared for unknown security threats that often have an even more devastating impact. In order to achieve the highest levels of security with superior total cost of ownership (TCO), a comprehensive “security platform” was required with natively integrated functionalities across all their environments, combined with a high degree of automation and an efficient “single-pass architecture” that provided visibility into all traffic, granular use of controls, and high performance.

Additionally, the company was looking for full consumption and deployment flexibility, as well as a (non-committal) test phase, to uncover the extent of security challenges in the five regions.

Palo Alto Networks and Verizon Solution

After a free-of-charge, week-long Security Lifecycle Reviews (SLR) that analyzed the customer’s environment and provided a detailed assessment of the security threats and risks, the customer opted for the complete Palo Alto Networks® security platform package, delivered through the Verizon VNS infrastructure. The complete security package offers the following security functions:

• Next-Generation Firewall
• NAT (Network Address Translation)
• Threat Prevention / IPS
• DNS Controls
• Site-to-Site VPN
• URL Filtering / Web Gateway
• SSL Decryption
• High Availability Deployments
• WildFire™ Cloud-Based Threat Analysis Service
• GlobalProtect™ Network Security Client for Endpoints

However, the customer began the rollout for all five locations with Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewall and select endpoint protection capabilities. They are planning to expand to the full range of endpoint protection solutions within the next 30 days.

Customer Benefits

Beginning to virtualize its security services has been a fast, enjoyable and beneficial process for the customer. As Virtual Network Services replace its legacy appliance-based security services with virtual network functions (VNFs), the company is realizing many VNS benefits, such as faster deployment times, flexible pay-as-you-go pricing, service tiers, complete end-to-end management, the ability to rapidly activate additional security functions, and an overall lower TCO.

At the same time, the customer is benefiting from achieving superior security protection due to the best-of-breed nature of the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform.

The customer is able to drive seamless policy controls throughout their organization across all locations (headquarters and subsidiaries), and they have now significantly reduced their attack surface while eliminating unnecessary risks from their prevention of known and unknown cyberthreats for all users. As additional security functions for the locations are “switched on” in the cloud, the benefits delivered from the flexible, complete and integrated Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform hosted on the Verizon VNS infrastructure are only expected to increase.