E-government initiatives provide citizens with better access to government services and place extra demands on IT and security teams. These initiatives must also block increasingly sophisticated threats as well as keep sensitive data and applications safe amid budget and staffing concerns. Palo Alto Networks® meets the security needs of state and provincial governments by automatically preventing cyberattacks and controlling access to sensitive data while minimizing security management overhead.
Keeping pace with new threats in dynamic online environments is an ongoing struggle for state and provincial government IT and security teams. Palo Alto Networks helps governments and their agencies face security challenges relating to:
The Palo Alto Networks Security Operating Platform automates threat prevention across your networks, devices and cloud environments, enabled by real-time traffic visibility and consistent security policies for users, applications and content.
State and provincial governments around the world use Palo Alto Networks to:
Most state or provincial government IT and security teams have little visibility into their network activity, which can leave them vulnerable to the misuse of applications or data and even serious security breaches. Palo Alto Networks Security Operating Platform allows granular visibility and control of users, applications and content on the network, enabling state governments to monitor usage, reduce risk and improve productivity. The platform leverages user information from a wide range of repositories, allowing IT teams to identify individual users, not just IP addresses. The platform also identifies thousands of applications that pass through it. Together, these capabilities:
Government employees may unwittingly or deliberately put the network or sensitive data at risk by following a link or downloading a file. With new malware created every minute, IT teams must constantly update security posture to remain effective. For coordinated and automated threat prevention, Palo Alto Networks threat analysis service conducts dynamic analysis of suspicious content – even encrypted content – in a virtual environment to discover brand-new threats anywhere in the world. It then triggers the creation of new protections and delivers them to platform enforcement points in as few as five minutes. Security Operating Platform deployments are continuously updated with protections against new phishing and malware sites, ransomware, malicious links in emails, and command-and-control infrastructure, blocking any part of an attack. This automation vastly reduces the operational burden on IT teams, which would normally have to manually update multiple security devices across the network to block even one part of such attacks.
Stealing and using passwords is one of the oldest tricks in the book, yet it remains very effective. The Security Operating Platform uses the latest threat intelligence, updated every five minutes, to block access to phishing sites. The platform also detects and stops enterprise credentials from passing to illegitimate external websites and thwarts attempts to use stolen credentials by enforcing authentication policies at the network layer.
IT teams must protect staff computers and mobile devices from unknown cyberthreats. Rather than relying on signatures, Palo Alto Networks advanced endpoint protection coordinates with threat intelligence and pre-emptively blocks known and unknown malware, exploits, and zero-day threats, enabling staff to use the web safely.
IT teams should have complete visibility and control over government-issued devices regardless of their physical location. The Palo Alto Networks platform extends both a VPN and granular security to remote staff and third-party devices – computers, tablets and smartphones – wherever they travel. Remote devices maintain the same security posture and access capabilities as inside the network perimeter.
The Security Operating Platform prevents successful cyberattacks through automation. It is easy to operate, with capabilities that work together so you can make the most of scarce cybersecurity resources. Enforcement points and shared intelligence work together at network speed to automatically prevent ever-changing cyberthreats from affecting computers, networks or data. Accurate analytics allow you to streamline routine tasks and focus on government priorities. Tight integration across the platform and with ecosystem partners delivers consistent security across cloud, network and mobile devices. Among the core elements:
Palo Alto Networks has recently opened up the platform, enabling you to swiftly take advantage of security innovations that meet the particular needs of higher education.
Palo Alto Networks apps on the Application Framework include:
For more information on the Palo Alto Networks Security Operating Platform, please visit https://www.paloaltonetworks. com/products/security-operating-platform.
State and provincial governments have the heavy responsibility of protecting critical infrastructure under their authority, such as transportation networks as well as energy and power systems.
Palo Alto Networks has secured ICS and SCADA systems for years by:
SaaS applications are traditionally invisible to IT. Palo Alto Networks solves this problem by providing full visibility into the day-to-day activities of employees using SaaS applications, such as Microsoft® Office 365® and Dropbox®.
Virtualized form factors of the platform extend the same security present in the on-premise network to public and private clouds. Protect Amazon® Web Services, Microsoft Azure® and Google® Cloud Platform environments and private clouds from advanced cyberattacks while providing application-level control between workloads, policy consistency from the network to the cloud, fast deployment and dynamic security policy updates as workloads change.
The biggest question for many IT and security teams in government is how to maximize user and data protection with minimal network and security resources. The Security Operating Platform natively integrates many capabilities, eliminating point products along with the cost and management overhead associated with them.
The platform approach centralizes policy creation and deployment as well as consolidates security event logging, reporting and forensics, dramatically simplifying security operations. Governments may start with one capability and add new ones to the platform over time, growing protection levels without the cost and complexity of installing and managing new network devices. Each security capability automatically correlates insights on newly emerging threats across endpoints, data centers and cloud resources, ensuring fast responses to any threat with no IT intervention required. Coordination increases as you add security capabilities, saving IT teams even more time.