Investment Bank Upgrades Global Infrastructure With Palo Alto Networks Firewalls

PRESS RELEASE

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Palo Alto Networks today announced that Greenhill & Co., Inc., a leading global independent investment bank, has selected Palo Alto Networks' PA Series next-generation firewalls as the cornerstone of a security infrastructure upgrade. Greenhill chose to upgrade its worldwide infrastructure with Palo Alto firewalls based on its unique user-based visibility and control, and opportunity to reduce costs through device consolidation.

Greenhill is a leading independent investment bank that provides financial advice on significant mergers, acquisitions and restructurings and manages merchant banking funds. With locations in New York, London, Frankfurt, Toronto, Dallas, San Francisco and Chicago, Greenhill is a trusted advisor on some of the business world's most significant and complex transactions. As a publicly traded financial services firm, Greenhill must comply with federal regulations to record all interactions with customers, including all electronic communications. In particular, webmail posed a unique challenge because current solutions for blocking usage were being circumvented by users switching to SSL encrypted versions of webmail applications.

Greenhill was attracted to the PA Series next-generation firewalls because of the unparalleled level of granularity and flexibility afforded in not only identifying all of the applications being used by employees, including those running over SSL, but controlling it on a per-user basis by integrating into Active Directory. In fact, Greenhill was able to rein in webmail usage, and provide controlled access for certain groups of users. This capability, when combined with robust content scanning and threat detection capabilities, allowed Greenhill to replace its current firewalls and associated security appliances with the PA Series, greatly reducing capital expenditures and operational costs.

"As a publicly traded, global financial services firm, there are strict requirements for capturing the content of all customer communications, and failure to do so can result in severe penalties," said John Shaffer, director of global systems and technology, Greenhill. "As a customer-driven business we also need to be flexible in interacting with customers in the manner they prefer. With the level of visibility and per-user granular control we now have over applications with Palo Alto Networks firewalls, we are able to do all of that, and reduce costs at the same time."

"Webmail is a perfect example of a next-generation application that can easily evade legacy firewalls and security infrastructure," said Steve Mullaney, vice president of marketing for Palo Alto Networks. "Gmail has both standard (HTTP) and SSL encrypted (HTTPS) modes. That makes it more secure for the user, but it also makes it much harder for the organization to monitor and control, leading to increased risk of threat, data leakage and regulatory non-compliance. Palo Alto Networks firewalls are the only products to enable business to embrace the Web 2.0 world in a manner that is safe for the business and its users."

About Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks(tm) is the innovative leader in next-generation firewalls, enabling user-based visibility and granular policy control of applications and content running on enterprise networks. Based on patent-pending App-ID(tm) technology, the Palo Alto Networks family of next-generation firewalls accurately identifies applications - regardless of port, protocol, evasive tactic or SSL encryption - and scans content to stop a broad range of threats and prevent data leakage at 10Gbps with no performance degradation. For the first time, enterprises can now embrace the Web 2.0 world in a manner that is safe for the business and its users, while offering significantly lowering total cost of ownership through device consolidation. For more information, please visit www.paloaltonetworks.com.