Palo Alto Networks today announced that the National Association of Counties (NACo) has deployed the PA-4000 Series next-generation firewall to gain visibility and control of applications and threats. As a result, NACo has improved its ability to identify and eliminate potential threats on the network and greatly reduced its risk.
NACo is the only national organization that represents county governments in the United States. Founded in 1935, NACo provides essential services to the nation’s 3,066 counties. NACo advances issues with a unified voice before the federal government, improves the public's understanding of county government, assists counties in finding and sharing innovative solutions through education and research, and provides value-added services to save counties and taxpayers money. NACo's membership totals more than 2,200 counties, representing over 80 percent of the nation's population.
“We needed to take a proactive approach to managing the risk to our business caused by P2P and malware,” said Bert Jarreau, NACo’s CIO. “Our existing firewall offered very limited visibility into what was happening on my network. With Palo Alto Networks, I now know what is going on with my network, and I can proactively tackle issues before they become problems. I can also enforce policy for what applications are allowed on the network.”
Based on Palo Alto Networks’ patent pending App-ID™ application classification technology, its PA-4000 Series is a next-generation firewall that gives organizations unmatched visibility into, and policy control over, applications flowing in and out of its networks, regardless of port, protocol or SSL encryption. The PA-4000 Series identifies traditional and emerging applications – including those embedded in an SSL session – to facilitate total application access and usage control while enabling broad, real-time threat prevention.
“Bottom line, the Internet has become a cesspool,” said Steve Mullaney, Palo Alto Networks’ Vice President of Marketing. “It has tremendous business value, but it’s also extremely easy for new applications and malware to pass through existing firewalls and disrupt business activities. Palo Alto Networks is giving control back to the IT department with visibility and control over these new applications and threats.”
About Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks™ enables visibility and policy control of applications running on enterprise networks. Based on innovative App-ID™ application classification technology, the Palo Alto Networks PA-4000 Series next-generation firewall accurately identifies applications – regardless of port, protocol, evasive tactic or even SSL encryption – at 10Gbps with no performance degradation. Enterprises can now set and enforce user-based application usage policies to meet compliance requirements, improve threat mitigation and lower operational costs. The Palo Alto Networks team includes security and networking industry veterans from Check Point, NetScreen, McAfee, Cisco and Juniper. It is backed by investors Globespan Capital Partners, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital. For more information, visit www.paloaltonetworks.com.
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