Protecting mission-critical infrastructure with limited resources and visibility.
- Chronic network instability: Weekly network outages hindered the university’s ability to deliver reliable services.
- Outdated infrastructure: Legacy security tools had reached end-of-life, with newer staff’s knowledge gaps compounding operational challenges.
- Limited visibility: Existing tools provided only piecemeal information about what was connecting to the network, masking the true scope of the university’s attack surface.
- Unmanaged devices: The “bring your own device” (BYOD) reality of campus life meant thousands of student-owned and guest devices connected to the network.
- Small staff, massive scope: As a lean staff, the IT team was often overwhelmed by manual alerts and reactive troubleshooting, leaving little time for strategic innovation.
“The new controls now identify and block thousands of malicious connections each year, while defending against hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of attempted attacks on the university’s network perimeter each day.”
– Matthew Kaczmarski
CISO & Director of Infrastructure, Winston-Salem State University
Building the foundation with next-generation firewalls
The transformation began with addressing WSSU’s most pressing infrastructure challenge: replacing legacy firewalls that were causing chronic network instability. The university deployed Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Hardware Firewalls (NGFWs) to protect both the network perimeter and data center environments, putting a stop to the weekly network outages that had plagued campus operations.
Beyond stability, the NGFWs delivered the foundational security controls that had been missing. Working from Zero Trust principles, the IT team configured the firewalls to provide granular control while maintaining the open, collaborative environment essential to higher education. Cloud-Delivered Security Services—including Advanced WildFire malware protection, Advanced Threat Prevention to prevent intrusion, and Advanced URL Filtering to combat web-based threats —added an integrated suite of protection to combat increasingly sophisticated attacks. The centralized reporting and visibility these tools provided revealed network issues the team had been unable to diagnose with its previous tool set.
Enabling camps anywhere
Modern higher education requires a “campus-anywhere” approach, and WSSU has institutionalized this flexibility with GlobalProtect to ensure that teaching, learning, and administration continue with zero downtime. Whether faculty are conducting research abroad, staff are working from home, or students are accessing lab resources remotely, the solution provides a seamless transition between environments while ensuring that security controls and data protections follow the user. By decoupling productivity from physical presence, WSSU has created a foundation for institutional resilience, allowing the university to remain fully operational through any external disruption without ever compromising its security posture.
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Discovering the invisible network with Enterprise Device Security
While WSSU had achieved stability and basic visibility through its firewall deployment, the IT team suspected blind spots in its understanding of what was actually connecting to the campus network. When the university activated Enterprise Device Security, the results were stunning. A network designed to support approximately 6,000 students, faculty, and staff revealed more than 60,000 connected devices.
The discovery was both alarming and enlightening. Student devices included not just laptops and phones but gaming consoles, smart speakers, and streaming devices. Research labs contributed specialized microscopes and scientific equipment with network connectivity. Campus infrastructure included security cameras, electronic door locks, card readers, elevator systems, and networked projectors. Each of these devices represented a potential entry point that previous security tools had failed to identify or assess.
Enterprise Device Security provided something WSSU had never had: complete visibility into devices that can’t run traditional security agents. The solution inventoried every connected device, assigned risk scores, and identified vulnerabilities—including active CVEs on unpatched equipment that the university’s existing vulnerability scanning tools had missed entirely.
The visibility extended beyond simple device counts to behavioral analysis and automated threat prevention. By leveraging automation and analytics, the platform monitors traffic patterns to and from these unmanaged devices, enabling the team to be proactive against risks in both inbound and outbound traffic to the secure network.
Empowering a small team through automation and ease of use
For a university with limited cybersecurity staff facing enterprise-scale threats, efficiency is essential. Palo Alto Networks transformed how WSSU’s team operates by automating tasks that previously consumed analyst time and by providing an interface that team members with varying skill levels can navigate confidently. Rather than drowning in alerts from disparate tools, analysts receive actionable intelligence they can respond to quickly. This efficiency gain extends beyond time savings—it enables the team to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive security improvements and, crucially, to invest in educating the campus community about cybersecurity hygiene.
Partnering for long-term mission success
While WSSU may be a smaller institution, its mission—transforming student lives for generations—is anything but. “It’s important to me that our partners recognize and appreciate that,” says CIO Raisha Cobb. “Palo Alto Networks has done that.” The relationship goes well beyond product deployment to include collaborative strategy around WSSU’s needs, including creatively handling budget constraints—for example, leveraging capabilities the university owns but may not be fully exploiting. The long-term orientation of the partnership means that as WSSU explores emerging technologies like AI-driven education tools and expanded virtual reality labs for nursing students, the security foundation is already in place to say yes to innovation without compromising protection.
“Partnering with Palo Alto Networks allows us to focus on the challenge of the ever-changing higher education landscape. I don’t have to worry about that part of our technology stack. I can focus on the mission of the university.”
– Raisha Cobb
Chief Information Officer, WSSU
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