Case Study: Vermont Judiciary achieves 100% uptime and Zero Trust security with Palo Alto Networks

Vermont Judiciary goes all in on platformization to further Zero Trust and secure the future

The Vermont Judiciary, which supports about 500 staff across 31 locations and serves nearly 650,000 citizens, faced frequent outages and fragmented security after splitting from the State of Vermont’s IT in 2022. Leadership set out to guarantee continuous, secure access to court services, consolidate vendors, and implement a NIST-aligned Zero Trust architecture with microsegmentation and cloud-delivered resiliency.

They platformized on Palo Alto Networks—deploying PA/VM Next‑Generation Firewalls, Prisma SASE (Prisma Access and Prisma SD‑WAN), Cortex XDR, Strata Cloud Manager and Unit 42 services—to unify networking, endpoint detection, and threat intelligence. The result: instant 100% uptime, 50× bandwidth and minimum triple redundancy at courthouses, SD‑WAN devices fielded in a day, MTTR cut from about two weeks to roughly three hours, and ~$350K saved annually (~10% of the operating budget).

Vermont Judiciary

Joseph Paquin

Director of IT