The United States spends more than $25 billion on cybersecurity every year to defend federal systems against increasing threats from hackers, ransomware groups and state-sponsored actors. Often customers purchase multiple, overlapping cybersecurity solutions to attack the same problem. Spending extra money on new programs won’t necessarily make federal systems any safer. In fact, most often it’s only diverting resources away from where funds can be deployed most effectively.
To actually harden these networks, federal agencies need to eliminate unnecessary redundancies, cut programs that don’t achieve results, integrate security efforts and redefine what cyber success looks like. So how they do so while maximizing efficiency? It starts with bringing cyber solutions together under one platform. When cybersecurity systems are spread out, different teams within the same organization end up doing the same work — wasting taxpayer dollars and slowing down threat response. Palo Alto Networks is helping federal organizations eliminate these redundancies by connecting cybersecurity teams together, under one central platform approach – the same thing that we’ve been doing with commercial customers for years.
This platformization effort helps aid efficiency across government, reducing the need to use federal funds on redundant programs while making sure agencies are laser-focused on the most effective way to root out threat actors. Using one stronger tool instead of several isolated ones saves taxpayer dollars and increases security capability.
At Palo Alto Networks, our platformization model is powered by Precision AI, which means artificial intelligence is built into the heart of the product function. Our automated, AI-powered systems identify up to ~9 million new cyberattacks per day, freeing up federal employees to focus on the most serious threats, knowing they have the best possible capability deployed in their environments.
Coupled with platformization, two of the most significant ways federal agencies can measure success are mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) to threats. Every cyber solution federal agencies pay for should be designed to improve and maintain fast response times, preventing threat actors from infiltrating critical systems and stealing critical government data.
Utilizing systems powered by AI is critical to minimizing MTTD and MTTR for organizations, further freeing up the federal workforce and maximizing efficiency efforts. If your MTTD is on the order of seconds and your MTTR is on the order of minutes, you have the best possible chance of identifying an incident and assessing its materiality as soon as possible. Historically, the Palo Alto Networks SOC analysts spent most of their day triaging alerts, with each analyst manually investigating about 13 incidents per day. After deploying XSIAM®, those same analysts now spend 70% of their day threat hunting and running attack simulations because they enjoy 100% alert coverage from AI and automation. Manual incident investigations are down to eight per day and, most crucially, the SOC has reduced its MTTD to less than 1 minute, and its MTTR to a few minutes.
As federal systems move more data to the cloud, we are helping organizations build security solutions that are equally as secure as on-premises cybersecurity tools. With so many federal agencies using different cloud providers, we’ve developed our FedRAMP High authorized cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). Prisma Cloud secures applications throughout their entire lifecycle — from code to cloud regardless of which cloud environment they run in, giving federal cyber officials one comprehensive view and control of their cybersecurity horizon, not just one cloud at a time.
Our public sector team has decades of experience working in and with public sector organizations, so they know where to look for waste, inefficiencies and pain points within government cybersecurity systems. We can help cut through the noise to keep systems safe.
Under a fresh approach and with tools at our disposal, government cyber is about to get a lot more efficient. We’re ready to get started.
Help your agency revolutionize IT security, streamline processes by joining our upcoming webinar, Driving Efficiency Through Integrated Next Generation Security on April 22. We will discuss how Palo Alto Networks industry-leading cybersecurity solutions can help lower your agency's costs, simplify operations, leverage AI, respond faster to threats, and improve compliance.