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Secures Network Access for Students, Faculty and Staff; Prevents Cyberattacks From Disrupting the Education Process

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 27, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Palo Alto Networks® (NYSE: PANW), the next-generation security company, today announced that Maine Township High School District 207 (District 207) has selected the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform to prevent cyberattacks and provide a safe online environment for its students. These capabilities are essential to comply with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and maintain a productive educational environment.

District 207 issues laptops to all its students, faculty and staff, and provides them with high-quality wireless services across three high school campuses. However, the District's previous security infrastructure did not provide sufficient access control and visibility into the wireless network. Gaps in security disrupted productivity and managing security policies was difficult and time-consuming.

By replacing the legacy security solutions and adopting the integrated Palo Alto Networks and Aruba Networks® offering, District 207 can now securely segment network traffic to maintain the privacy of faculty and staff activity while providing students with safe wireless access to school and internet resources. In addition to strengthening overall security, the district improved internet latency by 40 percent while simplifying policy management, saving hundreds of administrative hours for IT.

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"Using the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform to secure all traffic to and from our network and the outside world, along with Aruba Networks ClearPass as our policy manager for wireless network access, has been a great combination. Before, we could only control access based on IP or MAC address, but because of the compatibility between Palo Alto Networks and Aruba, now we can push policies to individual users and devices on both our wireless and wired networks." ? Jon Urbanski, network manager, Maine Township High School District 207

District 207 relies on the Palo Alto Networks platform to secure all traffic passing to and from its network and the internet. To do this, the district deployed a PA-3020 next-generation firewall at each campus. The district also included subscriptions for Threat Prevention, URL Filtering, and WildFire™ threat analysis cloud services. This provides District 207 with application, user and content visibility and control, as well as protection against known and unknown cyberthreats. The WildFire cloud provides central intelligence capabilities and automates the delivery of preventive measures against cyberattacks.

Additionally, District 207 uses the integration between Aruba Networks and Palo Alto Networks to segment its wireless network for each school, providing a private network for faculty and staff, a separate secure network for students, and a guest network. Through this integration, the district is able to prevent students from accessing the faculty and staff network, and protect students and faculty with strong security, without impeding online learning opportunities.