Customer Spotlight: University of Portsmouth Improves and Secures Internet Services

The University of Portsmouth, one of England’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, has a student body of nearly 22,000, is supported by a staff of 2,500, and like many educational institutions, balances academic freedom and flexible network access with security and resource consumption concerns.

The University of Portsmouth relies heavily on its network to support its academic mission. With the constant demand for reliable and high performance Internet services, coupled with the huge increase in devices connecting to Wi-Fi, the University upgraded its Janet link (Jisc’s network, Janet, is the U.K.’s high-speed network for the U.K. research and education community) to 10GB to improve network responsiveness, improve security and expand services to faculty and students, but until recently it had only been able to utilize 1GB of bandwidth from Janet due to the throughput limitations of its incumbent firewalls.

“We knew that future problems would occur if we didn’t upgrade and replace our existing firewall estate soon,” says James Holland, Network and Security Services Manager, University of Portsmouth. “People expect to be able to do things they do at home whilst they are on campus. They want to access the same resources and tools without issue, no matter which device they use or how it’s configured.”

With this problem in mind, the university’s longtime strategic IT partner Khipu Networks devised a solution to upgrade and secure the university’s Janet link. The company proposed University of Portsmouth look into Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform, with Threat Intelligence Cloud and Advanced Endpoint Security, and Palo Alto Networks Panorama network security management.

“Our goal was to help the university move to an innovative technology that’s application-aware so they could be more proactive about threats,” says Guy Jermany, Technical Director for Khipu Networks.

Read the full case study here: /customers/university-of-portsmouth

Khipu Networks has been a Platinum partner of Palo Alto Networks since 2010 and is an Authorized Service Centre (ASC) as well as Certified Professional Services Partner (CPSP).