Palo Alto Networks today announced that Western & Southern Financial Group (Western & Southern) has deployed the PA-4000 Series next-generation firewall for granular visibility and control of Internet applications and threats. As a result, Western & Southern is improving its ability to identify and eliminate potential threats on the network and greatly reduce risk.
A Fortune 500 company and leader in financial services, Western & Southern has more than 180 offices in 23 states with assets owned, managed and under their care in excess of $48 billion. The company has a track record of aggressively defending business and client assets. Understanding the changing landscape, Western & Southern took the proactive step of evaluating its current security infrastructure and identifying gaps in visibility.
“At Western & Southern, we are extremely interested in anything that can help us to manage risk,” said Doug Ross, Western & Southern’s Chief Technology Officer. “The previous generation of security infrastructure did not provide complete visibility into the latest evasive applications and the threats they can carry. Palo Alto Networks has given us the ability to identify what’s really going on with our network at a much more granular level. We’ve been able to use that information to identify malicious software on desktops, shut down evasive applications and threats, as well as geographically pinpoint application sources and destinations.”
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.
“The existing security infrastructure is broken and we’ve reached the point where organizations have no idea what is on their network and what their users are doing.” said Steve Mullaney, Palo Alto Networks’ Vice President of Marketing. “Every customer we engage with finds a hidden world of applications, users and activities they thought that they were effectively blocking or never knew existed. Western & Southern is the type of forward-thinking organization that recognized the evolution of applications and threats, and has moved quickly to adapt.”
In addition to managing risk, Western & Southern is aware of the increasing cost and complexity of their IT infrastructure due to the large number of security devices in the network. Over time, Western & Southern plans to expand the role of the PA-4000 Series to consolidate the functionality of other security devices - thus improving security via application visibility and control, while greatly simplifying the infrastructure and reducing operational costs.
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 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, Juniper and Blue Coat. It is backed by investors Globespan Capital Partners, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital. For more information, visit www.paloaltonetworks.com.
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