HIPAA News

Catholic Charities Leverages Granular Application Visibility and Control of PA-4000 Series Firewall to Improve Security, Performance and Compliance

(Dec 18, 2007)-- Palo Alto Networks today announced that Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County has upgraded its network infrastructure and centralized security and application controls with its PA-4000 Series next generation firewall.

A community lifeline for more than 50 years, Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County serves 27,000 clients annually with a broad base of programs including housing services, job skills training and placement, mental health and substance abuse counseling, older adult services, financial education, immigration, refugee resettlement, as well as children and youth services education.

“The relationship between Catholic Charities and the community it serves is based on decades of trust,” said Will Bailey, IT Manager for Catholic Charities. “As a result, anything we do to expand our services or capabilities as an organization must preserve that trust. The visibility and control the PA-4000 Series affords us allows us to ensure that bandwidth and network resources are being used appropriately and have not been compromised – giving us the greatest confidence that our clients’ privacy and security are protected.”

As part of a move to upgrade its infrastructure to an MPLS network, Catholic Charities consolidated distributed Internet connections through one central location, requiring a true enterprise-class firewall. With 400 employees and volunteers of widely varying technology expertise, and highly confidential health information traversing its networks, they also required extensive application visibility and control. They selected the PA-4000 Series, based on its ability to not only help ensure HIPAA compliance, but also protect – on a per user basis – the organization from malware and inadvertent exposure.

Just prior to the upgrade to the Palo Alto Networks firewall, the organization was experiencing excessive email failures with key business partners, and upon investigation found out that they had been blacklisted as a spammer. The PA-4000 Series was installed and allowed the IT team to quickly identify a spyware infected machine, stop the flow of spam, and within a day, get the company removed from the blacklist before the issue resulted in any further business impact. The PA-4000 Series has also allowed Catholic Charities to set and enforce more effective application usage policies based on bandwidth usage or risk.

“Non-profit organizations like Catholic Charities face a difficult challenge in ensuring enterprise-class security with limited staff resources,” said Steve Mullaney, Vice President of Marketing for Palo Alto Networks. “As a result, they require a powerful and high-performance security solution to protect the agency against traditional, as well as emerging threats, coupled with easy configuration and management. The PA-4000 Series next-generation firewall gives them, for the first time, the application visibility and control they need to protect the agency.”

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