Palo Alto Networks announced on Monday that it is collaborating with the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to help strengthen the security and resilience of its digital services. This has delivered tangible improvements as part of a project to transform networks and security across the ministry.
Palo Alto Networks is working closely with the Digital Infrastructure and Security Operations team at Justice Digital. This department of the MoJ aims to provide improved, simpler and faster services for more than 96,000 internal and external users across 1,200 courts, prisons, probation services, attendance centres and arms-length bodies (external organisations that work with the ministry). After implementing Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE and Cortex XSIAM, the MoJ has seen a 400% increase in automatically resolved security incidents per day. What’s more, dedicated internet access circuits for WAN connectivity using SD-WAN have led to an average 5x increase in bandwidth.
“Given the critical nature of the MoJ’s work, security is a big focus,” said Nava Ramanan, Deputy Director Digital Infrastructure and Security Operations, Ministry of Justice. “We are prioritising fundamental principles like cloud-first, secure-by-design, and a zero trust security model. This ensures that our infrastructure remains secure and resilient, but also aligned with the latest technological advancements including AI related innovation.”
As a user of Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) for many years, the MoJ expanded collaboration between the two companies by selecting Palo Alto Networks Prisma SASE to spearhead its network security modernisation strategy. This involved consolidating SD-WAN and Security Services Edge (SSE) into a cloud-delivered, unified SASE solution which provides resilience, advanced AI security services, visibility and control for more than 800 live services and 130,000 devices across 13 organisations within the MoJ.
Another recent measure to protect these devices and services has involved the MoJ’s Security Operations Centre (SOC) being revamped to proactively monitor, detect, analyse and respond to cybersecurity threats and incidents in real time. The Palo Alto Networks AI-driven security operations platform, Cortex XSIAM, is a key part of this effort. It is used for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Attack Surface Management (ASM) and real-time risk identification.
“Before we started working with the MoJ, it needed to strengthen its security posture and resilience to combat the sophisticated cyber threats that it was facing,” said Helmut Reisinger, CEO of EMEA at Palo Alto Networks. “To achieve this, we worked with the MoJ’s team to build an effective SOC with embedded threat intelligence and proactive security monitoring across all of the ministry’s critical services. This has achieved improvements across the metrics that are priorities for the MoJ, including: reducing Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) and operational risk. These results have been made possible thanks to our Customer Success and Professional Services teams that have collaborated closely with the MoJ to maximize the value delivered by the transformation program.”
In future, the ministry will securely connect all courts, probation offices, prisons and head offices with logical separation to their data and applications. As part of this strategy, Prisma SASE will be used to enable fast, trusted integration of 34 third-party MoJ agencies and public bodies.
