Hotel Customer Simplifies Network Security with Strata Cloud Manager

In the ever-evolving landscape of Network Security, organizations grapple with complex challenges, seeking innovative solutions to strengthen their defenses. Enter Strata Cloud Manager, a revolutionary Zero Trust management and operations solution that strengthens security and proactively helps prevent network disruptions across all enforcement points. In this blog post, we delve into the real-life impact of Strata Cloud Manager through the lens of a valued customer, TUI Hotels & Resorts, the leisure hotel segment of a leading global tourism group. Before we do that, let’s cover what sparked the creation of Strata Cloud Manager and why it’s the industry’s first of its kind.

Unpacking Customer Challenges

Our customers have told us their biggest challenges:

1. Network disruptions are costly, and they can’t predict and prevent them from impacting the business.
2. Network security tools are underutilized and under-deliver on their value, because they’re not equipped with best practices.
3. Security teams struggle to manage the complexity of the various enforcement points in their environment.

Strata Cloud Manager Fills A Crucial Gap

Strata Cloud Manager has three strategic areas of focus:

1. First, it forecasts deployment health and proactively identifies capacity bottlenecks up to 7 days in advance with predictive analytics.
2. Second, it uses AI-powered analysis of policies and real-time security compliance checks against industry and Palo Alto Networks best practices.
3. And third, for the very first time, it manages configuration and security policies across all form factors from a single UI. This includes SASE, hardware and software firewalls and all security services.

Check out the Solution Brief to learn more.

TUI’s Journey to Simplify, Streamline and Secure Their Network

TUI Hotels & Resorts is a global tourism company with hotels in prime holiday spots across the world, covering all areas of the leisure hotel market from economy to luxury offerings. As one of the earliest adopters of Strata Cloud Manager, TUI sought a modern and scalable solution to meet their growing network security needs. Sebastian Schubert, Technology Lead at TUI, shared the challenges they faced with their previous solution:

“Before implementing Strata Cloud Manager, our organization’s firewalls were managed by a third-party provider. We decided to replace them with a self-managed solution that would meet our security standards. During the evaluation phase, our SE from Palo Alto introduced us to Strata Cloud Manager, which was still in its early stages. We were looking for a solution that could simplify the management of 30 hotels and ensure consistent security policies across them.”

TUI had to manually keep track of all their policies and configure each new firewall individually, a time-consuming and error-prone process. Faced with the task of refreshing their firewall fleet and consolidating their network security into one platform, Sebastian saw Strata Cloud Manager as the answer to these management and operational challenges.

“Strata Cloud Manager has streamlined our network security infrastructure by providing us with a prebuilt default configuration for every firewall. We can easily make changes to our policies with a few clicks and apply them to all our firewalls automatically. We also benefit from the integration with AIOps technology, which alerts us of any potential threats and best practices. This results in a clear and simple configuration that maximizes our security,” said Schubert.

As Sebastian explained, TUI harnessed the power of AI and automation to scale the efforts of their limited IT team, ensuring consistency of security across their environment. After seeing an immediate impact to the business using Strata Cloud Manager, they found additional benefits with the native Cortex Data Lake integration that “allows [them] to quickly resolve any connection problems in [their] network,” which “helped [them] to oversee [their] entire security estate more effectively.”

Sebastian also recognized the need for a consistent approach in creating policies that adhered to industry best practices. He goes on by saying:

“It [Strata Cloud Manager] provides us with a built-in best practice advisor that guides us when we create new policies or other security profiles, like Prisma Access. Additionally, it automates the update of all our devices after the expiration certificate announcement, saving us time and effort.”

TUI Hotels & Resorts is now able to deliver reliable security and simplified operations with the help of Strata Cloud Manager. To wrap up his experience, Sebastian shares:

“We have had a lot of success working with Palo Alto Networks to implement Strata Cloud Manager. It was very interesting to see its evolution to the current system. I recommend that you try it out. Even if you are not very familiar with other Palo Alto Networks products, you will learn how to use it effectively very fast.”

Learn More About Strata Cloud Manager

Sebastian’s testimonial from TUI Hotels & Resorts paints a picture of the real-life impact and transformative journey that organizations can embark on with Strata Cloud Manager. To hear more from Sebastian and learn about how to simplify, streamline and secure your enterprise, watch our recent network security event, Cosmos On-Demand.