Case Study: The Lines Company achieves enhanced security, cost savings and productivity gains with Palo Alto Networks

New Zealand Utility Bolsters Security Posture, Cost Savings and Productivity Gains with Palo Alto Networks

The Lines Company is a community-owned electricity distributor in rural New Zealand whose IT estate was nearing end of life. Legacy Fortinet firewalls were time-consuming to manage, provided poor visibility across the network and SCADA systems, and left the organization exposed to persistent security issues that staff had to remediate daily.

The company deployed the Palo Alto Networks Next‑Generation Security Platform (NGFWs in HA, Threat Prevention, WildFire, PAN‑DB URL Filtering and GlobalProtect) to protect data centres, depots and hundreds of SCADA devices. The rollout uncovered 100+ resident vulnerabilities, cut incident‑review time tenfold (from ~5 hours to ~30 minutes), reduced security rules by 30%, lowered bandwidth use by 40%, saved about half an FTE (~$50k/yr) and avoided roughly $50k in IPS/AV upgrade costs—delivering substantial cost savings and a dramatically stronger security posture.

The Lines Company

Andy Simpson

Head of Information Technology