Case Study: HEAnet achieves protection for more than 1 million students and teachers with Palo Alto Networks' Security Operating Platform

HEAnet Protects More Than a Million Students and Teachers With the Security Operating Platform

HEAnet is Ireland’s National Education and Research Network, providing broadband and ICT services to about 4,000 schools and more than 1 million students and staff. It needed to enforce content‑security policies across diverse school types, cope with BYOD and smartphone growth, handle large usage spikes and increasing classroom traffic, and reliably monitor and protect a nationwide network.

HEAnet deployed the Palo Alto Networks Security Operating Platform—upgrading from PA‑5000 to PA‑7000/PA‑7080 next‑generation firewalls with Threat Prevention, PAN‑DB URL Filtering and WildFire, implemented with local partners. The solution delivered improved threat detection and traffic visibility, flexible policy controls for 4,000 schools, 30 Gbps throughput (upgradeable to 100 Gbps), handling peaks of ~600,000 TCP sessions/day, simplified management via APIs and the scalability to meet growth for the coming years.

HEAnet

John Boland

Chief Executive