Case Study: Canterbury Christ Church University achieves complete visibility and advanced threat protection with Palo Alto Networks

Simplifying higher education network security against a rapidly expanding threat landscape

Canterbury Christ Church University, a UK higher-education institution with 26,000 students, 1,800 staff and multiple campuses, faced an expanding attack surface driven by digitisation, personal devices and siloed data. Leadership needed to improve visibility and control across distributed networks, secure sensitive student, research and financial data, prevent malware and zero‑day attacks, and enable anywhere access — all without increasing headcount.

The university standardised on a connected Palo Alto Networks security stack (PA- and VM‑Series NGFWs, DNS Security, Advanced Threat Prevention, URL Filtering, WildFire, Panorama and Prisma Access) alongside KHIPU’s cloud-native MDR SOC powered by XSOAR and Google Chronicle. The deployment protects thousands of endpoints and servers across data centres and Azure, delivers full traffic visibility (including encrypted traffic), reduces risk and admin overhead through AI/automation, boosts performance and remote access (100Gb throughput, GlobalProtect VPN), and streamlines incident response — with a planned platform refresh to extend protections further.

Canterbury Christ Church University

Andy Powell

Chief Technology Officer