DOING ITS HOMEWORK
Janzen and his team were ready to act. They sought a security solution offering
superior network visibility and that integrated with Active Directory to tie an IP
address to a specific user. This capability would enable flexible access policies by
user, allow IT personnel to monitor traffic and solve the school district’s unique
security vulnerabilities. Ease of use was also paramount. “We didn’t have time for a
huge learning curve to figure out the set up for a solution,” says Janzen.
To alleviate congestion on its Internet links, and administrative burdens such as
installing updates on hundreds of computers, the district moved to a distributed
architecture. “By decentralizing and distributing resources like file shares and desktop
upgrades and making them local instead of all in the data center, and creating VPN
connections to our sites, we hoped to significantly reduce bandwidth utilization and
costs,” says Janzen. But first, he had to find the right solution.
The district’s IT partner, X-10 Networks, suggested Palo Alto Networks. “I did
some research and concluded that Palo Alto Networks might be a really good fit,”
says Janzen. The PA-2000 Series, PA-200 and PA-500 next-generation firewalls
afford unprecedented visibility and granular policy control of applications and
content—by user, not just IP address—at up to 20Gbps with no performance
degradation. The firewalls isolate and protect data through security policies that
are based on the user or group identity from within Active Directory. The user and
group identity is then tied directly to a specific application, and the application can
then be inspected for threats and unauthorized data transfer