Case Study: St. Lawrence College achieves Zero Trust security across network, endpoint, and cloud with Palo Alto Networks

St. Lawrence College Uses Threat Intelligence and Automation to Secure Resources Across Network, Endpoint, and Cloud Environments

St. Lawrence College, a three‑campus Ontario community college serving about 10,000 full‑time students, needed to provide open, seamless access to educational resources while protecting students, staff, and cloud/SaaS services from increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats. Its legacy port‑based firewalls lacked visibility and modern threat prevention, and rapid adoption of SaaS and public cloud services widened the attack surface.

The college standardized on the Palo Alto Networks Security Operating Platform—deploying Next‑Generation Firewalls with App‑ID, Prisma Access and Prisma SaaS, Traps endpoint protection, WildFire, MineMeld/AutoFocus, Panorama and Cortex Data Lake—to establish a Zero Trust posture and automate threat intelligence. The deployment automated blocking of malicious activity, simplified centralized policy management across campuses, ensured consistent on‑ and off‑network enforcement, improved visibility for proactive response, and positioned the team to adopt analytics‑driven detection and response (Cortex XDR).

St. Lawrence College

Dave Mayo

Associate Director, IT Systems Security & Networks