Case Study: National Research Council of Italy (CNR‑IMAA) achieves secure, continuous research and sub‑20‑minute incident response with Palo Alto Networks

Ensuring hundreds of Italian scientific researchers work securely and with confidence

CNR-IMAA, a research institute within Italy’s National Research Council (CNR), supports hundreds of scientists working on environmental and geophysical projects and manages petabytes of observational data and virtualised services. The institute needed to secure high‑speed, low‑latency north–south and east–west traffic, prevent credential theft, apply dynamic policies for virtual workloads, and reduce slow, day‑long incident response times from its legacy firewalls.

CNR‑IMAA deployed Palo Alto Networks ML‑Powered Next‑Generation Firewalls in a high‑availability cluster, plus GlobalProtect, Panorama, AutoFocus and other Cloud‑Delivered Security Services, to centralise management, automate protections and share threat intelligence with Unit 42. The result: full Layer‑7 visibility, fewer false positives, movement toward a Zero Trust model, and incident response times reduced to under 20 minutes, enabling secure, continuous research.

National Research Council of Italy

Ermann Ripepi

Head of Infrastructure and Networks