Case Study: University of the Witwatersrand protects 41,000 students with Palo Alto Networks' AI-driven Cortex XDR and XSOAR

Wits University protects 41,000 students with modern, AI-based security operations

The University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), a multicampus South African university serving 41,000 students and staff, faced rising sophisticated, multistage cyberthreats across a complex, open academic environment. A basic SIEM produced an overwhelming volume of alerts and stretched limited security resources, leaving the SecOps team struggling to protect sensitive research, student data, and university operations.

Wits deployed a managed SOC from KHIPU Networks using Palo Alto Networks’ AI-driven security operations platform—Cortex XDR and Cortex XSOAR—to protect 300+ servers and ingest data from firewalls, mail gateways and other sources. Behavioral analytics, ML profiling, and automated playbooks dramatically reduced alert noise, stopped zero-day and fileless attacks, sped investigations, and freed security staff to focus on strategic, value-added work while ensuring uninterrupted learning and operations.

The University of the Witwatersrand

Hement Gopal

Senior Security Engineer