Moving to the head of the class with the Palo Alto Networks security platform

Los Rios Community College District is the second-largest community college district in California, responsible for providing a vibrant learning environment for 65,000 students. During the pandemic, the district faced a major challenge when its legacy technology couldn’t handle the rise of remote work and distance learning. Unintegrated security tools lacked capabilities to protect cloud resources, creating dangerous security risks. The District partnered with Palo Alto Networks to transform its network, empowering it to provide quality education with modern infrastructure to protect users and valuable data.

• Needed to find a new way to secure and support a rapidly growing number of remote users while maintaining academic freedom.
• Small team lacked visibility and tools to proactively fight cyberthreats across on-premises and AWS, Oracle, and Azure cloud environments.
• Unintegrated products hindered threat monitoring and increased risk of errors.
• Managing multiple firewall platforms and manually sifting through alerts to find threats taxed the IT team.

The District embarked on a multicloud strategy to protect its four colleges, headquarters, and remote users. It leveraged the Palo Alto Networks platform for network security, deploying software and hardware Next-Generation Firewalls to block attacks and improve traffic visibility. With Panorama, the small network security team easily manages 15 firewalls across a large on-premises and cloud footprint. A secure remote access client provides Zero Trust network access for more than 1,600 faculty and staff working remotely, while more than 50,000 students and employees are protected by multifactor authentication to keep attackers at bay. Cortex XDR automatically groups alerts into related incidents, giving the team unprecedented visibility into attacks in the environment and the precise information they need to take action before damage is done.