Palo Alto Networks™, the network security company, today announced that Shinshu University has deployed its PA-4000 Series next-generation firewalls for accurate threat prevention on its 14,000-user network and for enhanced visibility and control over applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing.
Shinshu University is a Japanese national university with eight facilities on five campuses. The university was founded in 1949 by integrating a number of academic schools and institutions throughout Japan. It is widely known for its academic excellence in engineering, medicine, science, economics and agriculture.
Before deploying Palo Alto Networks’ next-generation firewalls, Shinshu University relied on legacy firewalls and other outdated security infrastructure which not only failed to accurately identify network threats and had a history of routinely reporting false positives, but also required deep analysis of the logs to try to determine exact application classification. This was a highly labor-intensive task, and prevented the university from timely assessments and remediation on its network. From a performance perspective, Shinshu University also needed to strike a good balance between ensuring the security of its networks and enhancing convenience to reinforce learning and education.
"Palo Alto Networks provides many built-in application types, and its App-ID technology provides a strong ability to identify applications on our network, giving us more granular application control," said Hikofumi Suzuki, Associate Professor at IIC (Integrated Intelligence Center), Shinshu University. "It helps us control various applications, such as on-line gaming, and allows us to block P2P file sharing and bot access, while allowing applications such as Skype. Our PA-4000 gives us the high performance required to effectively manage the high demands of our production network."
"Shinshu University provides a good example of how legacy firewalls cannot keep up, both from a network protection standpoint and a performance standpoint," said Mori Kinjo, Palo Alto Networks Regional VP of Sales, Japan. "Organizations understand that the firewalls of yesterday do not meet the network performance and threat requirements of today. As such, we are seeing good growth in Japan, fueled by organizations’ needs for more granular visibility and control to best protect their networks."
Moving forward, Shinshu University also plans to leverage Palo Alto Networks for more refined user access control, in addition to controlling more applications on the network.
"We have five different security domains on campus, and there’s demand from some faculties that want to create their own security policies and manage them separately," said Suzuki. "Now, our PA-4000 offers us a rich set of features to enable granular policy management by different faculty. We can also delegate policy management privileges to each domain’s administrator."
Net One Systems, Japan's largest network integrator, proposed Palo Alto Networks’ next-generation firewall and installed it for Shinshu University.
Suzuki said, "Net One Systems fully understood our objectives and challenges and proposed the best solution for this, the PA-4000. They built a test network environment and evaluated this next-generation firewall, and proved it has the features and performance to meet our needs with no problems. We could integrate this next-generation firewall into our existing network with confidence and relief."
About Net One Systems Co., Ltd.
Net One Systems is continually searching and scrutinizing the most advanced technologies. The company provides network systems that add high-quality technical service to its verified products. Net One Systems provides highly reliable high value added comprehensive solutions, including consultation, designing, creation and management services. This is conducted through its technical center for technology research, quality control center for inspection of both incoming and outgoing products, and network academy for providing engineer education.
About Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks™ is the leader in next-generation firewalls, enabling unprecedented visibility and granular policy control of applications and content – by user, not just IP address – at up to 10Gbps with no performance degradation. Based on patent-pending App-ID™ technology, Palo Alto Networks firewalls accurately identify and control applications – regardless of port, protocol, evasive tactic or SSL encryption – and scan content to stop threats and prevent data leakage. Enterprises can for the first time embrace Web 2.0 and maintain complete visibility and control, while significantly reducing total cost of ownership through device consolidation. For more information, visit www.paloaltonetworks.com.
Palo Alto Networks, the Palo Alto Networks Logo and App-ID are trademarks of Palo Alto Networks, Inc. in the United States. All other trademarks, trade names or service marks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
