Case Study: Ada County achieves next-generation, prevention-based network and endpoint protection with Carahsoft

Idaho’s Largest County Takes a Next-Generation Approach to Governing Security

Ada County, Idaho’s largest county, needed to enable varied network access across 11 departments while preventing sophisticated threats from compromising critical network assets and taxpayer data. Working with Carahsoft, the county adopted the Palo Alto Networks Next‑Generation Security Platform — including Threat Prevention, WildFire, Traps endpoint protection, Panorama and AutoFocus — to move from legacy port‑based firewalls to a prevention‑oriented, application‑ and user‑aware security model.

Carahsoft helped deploy next‑generation firewalls across multiple sites and roll out Traps on roughly 2,100 workstations, 75 virtual desktops and 250 servers, with centralized policy and logging via Panorama and threat intelligence from AutoFocus. The solution stopped 52 process‑launch attempts in the first month, blocked the Bad Rabbit zero‑day, prevented known and unknown threats, simplified granular access controls for departments, and reduced lost productivity — demonstrating measurable improvement in Ada County’s security posture.

Ada County

Bret Lopeman

IT Security Engineer