Case Study: Ada County achieves proactive threat prevention with Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform

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

Ada County, Idaho’s largest county serving more than 440,000 residents across six cities and numerous departments, faced the challenge of providing varied network access for prosecutors, law enforcement, administrators and external agencies while protecting sensitive taxpayer data. Their legacy port-and-protocol firewalls couldn’t inspect modern threats or support granular, role-based access for a diverse public-sector environment, leaving a single security engineer to manage thousands of devices reactively.

Ada County replaced legacy gear with the Palo Alto Networks Next‑Generation Security Platform—next‑gen firewalls plus Threat Prevention, WildFire, Traps endpoint protection, Panorama management and AutoFocus intelligence—to enforce application- and user-based policies and integrated endpoint prevention. The deployment delivered centralized logging and trend analysis, simplified policy management, prevented known and unknown attacks (Traps blocked 52 process-launch attempts in month one and stopped Bad Rabbit ransomware), and restored productivity through a prevention-first security posture.

Ada County

Bret Lopeman

IT Security Engineer