Case Study: The Heinz Endowments achieves restored productivity and stronger security with Palo Alto Networks' Next-Generation Firewalls and WildFire

The Heinz Endowments Regains Lost Productivity with Improved Security from Next-Generation Firewalls and WildFire™ from Palo Alto Networks®

The Heinz Endowments is a 40-person Pittsburgh-based non-profit foundation that must stay openly accessible to grantees and the public. That openness—public email addresses, frequent scanned attachments, SharePoint collaboration and external servers—led to a rise in sophisticated phishing and malware that forced monthly shutdowns and kept the one-person IT team spending roughly 25% of his time remediating infections. The organization needed much better network visibility and safer, more granular application access.

Heinz replaced legacy Cisco ASAs with Palo Alto Networks PA-3020 (high-availability pair) and nine PA-200 branch firewalls, managed with Panorama, and deployed Threat Prevention, URL Filtering and WildFire. Since deployment they report zero network infections, WildFire stopped three malicious attachments in the first month that other defenses missed, IT reclaimed about 25% of its time, and the foundation cut nearly $11,600 in annual costs through device consolidation while gaining stronger application visibility, per-user policies and centralized management.

The Heinz Endowments

Charlie Richardson

Director of Information Technology