Palo Alto Networks is proud to enter a strategic partnership with the RAF Association.

For over 90 years, the Royal Air Forces Association (RAFA) has championed a simple yet profound belief: No member of the RAF community should ever be left without the help they need. Serving personnel, veterans and their families, the RAF Association provides crucial welfare support, responding to increasingly complex needs in an era of operational changes and challenges, including persistent global deployment.

Delivering on their mission today requires not only compassion and expertise but also resilient digital foundations. To strengthen and future-proof its operations, RAFA has entered into a strategic partnership with Palo Alto Networks. Together, we are modernising the Association's cyber security posture through a secure-by-design, zero trust architecture to enhance organisational resilience, secure sensitive beneficiary data, and improve operational agility. This helps ensure they can focus on their mission of support, not security management.

As Nick Bunting OBE, Secretary General at the RAF Association, puts it:

Cybersecurity is essential to safeguarding the trust people place in our organisation. This transformation will give us greater protection for our data and systems, ensuring that our services remain dependable and that our organisation is secure, resilient and ready for the future. Strong digital security is not just a technical requirement, it is a fundamental part of how we uphold our duty of care to every individual who relies on us.

Securing the Mission

The RAF Association operates in a distributed environment comprising headquarters’ functions, remote caseworkers, and more than 20 RAFAKidz nursery sites, supported by a growing portfolio of cloud-based services. In this context, cybersecurity is not simply an IT concern. It is a safeguarding imperative.

Disruption to systems or a compromise of sensitive beneficiary data could directly impact RAFA’s ability to deliver services and maintain the trust of the communities it supports. By consolidating fragmented legacy tools into a unified platform, this partnership ensures the Association’s digital evolution aligns security controls with GDPR obligations and safeguarding requirements.

Digital Resilience with a Unified Platform for Visibility and Control

To support RAFA's lean IT operational model, this transformation will move them away from fragmented legacy tools toward a unified platform approach. The deployment of Prisma^® SASE (secure access service edge) and Cortex XDR^® will provide RAFA with consistent visibility and control across users, devices, applications and data, regardless of location. This consolidation replaces complexity with clarity, allowing the organisation to inspect traffic for threats in real-time. Security policies are now enforced continuously, threats are detected and contained faster, and access to critical systems is governed by zero trust principles without compromising the user experience.

As Phil Sherwin, Chief Information Officer, at the RAF Association states:

Our data is one of our most valuable assets and the protection of that data, as we continue to provide life-changing support to members of the RAF community, is our most important priority. This partnership will move us into the next generation of security tools that adopt zero trust principles and is a crucial step on our journey to providing a layered approach to data protection.

One of the most critical aspects of this modernisation is supporting RAFA’s diverse workforce, particularly within the RAFAKidz nursery sites. These environments rely on nondesk-based staff using iPads and mobile devices to get their critical work done.

Using zero touch provisioning and the Prisma Browser™, we are enabling secure, seamless connectivity for unmanaged devices. This ensures that nursery staff can access necessary SaaS applications safely without complex login hurdles or manual configuration, improving their agility and allowing them to focus on caring for children rather than troubleshooting technology.

Creating Operational Advantage by Scaling Operations with AI and Automation

As a charity, RAFA has a responsibility to ensure resources are used efficiently. A critical goal of this partnership is to improve productivity and allow the organisation to scale its services without increasing the IT burden.

By adopting Strata™ Cloud Manager with AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations), RAFA is shifting from reactive security operations to proactive, automated management. Machine learning helps identify configuration risks and performance issues before they affect users, while standardized policies enable the secure, consistent onboarding of new sites. This shift is projected to significantly reduce operational overhead, enabling RAFA to scale its support network cost-effectively. This shift is projected to reduce operational overhead by 40–50%.

A Resilient Future

This partnership is about more than deploying technology. It is about ensuring RAFA remains resilient, trusted and capable of supporting the RAF community for decades to come.

As Darren Bisbey, Head of Group Information Security for the RAF Association, puts it:

We live in an era where digital threats are accelerating in both scale and sophistication, creating unprecedented challenges for organisations. Our partnership with Palo Alto is a statement of intent, reflecting our unwavering commitment to building the most secure environments possible for our data.

At Palo Alto Networks, we are honored to support RAFA in this journey, providing the digital armour and operational advantage necessary to protect those who serve and have served.

As Alistair Wildman, Palo Alto Networks CEO for Northern Europe states:

For over 90 years, RAFA has been a lifeline for the RAF community; it is our privilege to ensure that legacy endures in a digital-first world. By embracing a unified, AI-driven platform, RAFA is moving beyond complex, fragmented security to a posture that is Secure by Design. This partnership allows them to navigate today’s threat landscape with confidence, ensuring their resources remain focused where they belong: on the families who need them.

Key Takeaways

1. Digital Resilience – Strategic Shift to Zero Trust Architecture: RAFA is modernizing its cybersecurity posture by implementing a comprehensive zero trust architecture. This transition involves moving from fragmented legacy tools to a unified platform approach, deploying Prisma^® SASE and Cortex XDR for 360-degree visibility and complete control over access and traffic.
2. Interoperability – Secure, Seamless Access for Diverse Workforce: The partnership ensures operational agility by simplifying security for nondesk-based staff, particularly at the RAFAKidz nursery sites. Solutions like Zero-Touch Provisioning and the Prisma Access Browser enable secure, seamless connectivity for unmanaged devices, allowing nursery staff to focus on their critical work without complex login or configuration issues.
3. Creating Operational Advantage – Efficiency and Scalability through AI and Automation: RAFA is leveraging technology to scale services efficiently and reduce operational overhead. By using Strata Cloud Manager with AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations), the organization can shift to proactive management and automating remediation, which is projected to reduce operational overhead by 40–50%.

The post Empowering the RAF Association with Next-Generation Cyber Resilience appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.

We are proud to announce that Frost & Sullivan has recognized Palo Alto Networks Prisma^® Browser as the best-positioned market leader in the Frost Radar: Zero Trust Browser Security (ZTBS), 2025 report, securing the premier position for innovation and a leadership position on growth.

This recognition comes at a pivotal moment. For the modern enterprise, the browser is no longer just an application; it is your new OS. With 85% of the work happening in browsers, it has become the focal point where revenue is generated and sensitive data is accessed. However, this shift has transformed your primary workspace into the primary attack vector, with 95% of organizations having reported a security incident originating in the browser, placing it on the frontline against sophisticated AI^® threats and critical vulnerabilities. The risk of evasive, AI-driven phishing attempts is compounded by the widespread use of managed and unmanaged devices, creating blind spots that allow sensitive data to be exfiltrated faster than ever.

To combat this, enterprises need a browser that doesn't just display the web but actively defends it with its users, apps, data and devices. This is a necessity that drives our latest industry recognition.

Proven Leadership Validated by the Market

Prisma Browser’s recognition as the best-positioned leader, securing the premier position for innovation and a leadership position on growth, is a testament to our commitment to deliver best-in-class security that is both easy to deploy and that IT and users love to use. By integrating Palo Alto Networks Precision AI^® technology, Cloud-Delivered Security Services (CDSS) and Enterprise DLP, we ensure our customers benefit from the power of our security engines. And because they are natively integrated in the browser, we are mitigating threats hiding in encrypted traffic, blind spot web channels, AI-powered spear phishing and other evasive web threats that legacy security tools simply cannot identify.

Prisma Browser’s Innovation Advantage

Our leadership is driven by continuous strategic innovation in the secure browser space. Prisma Browser delivers critical "last-mile" protection through the native integration of CDSS, including Advanced WildFire^® for zero-day malware analysis and Advanced URL Filtering instantly at the point of user interaction. Building on this foundation, our latest innovations extend secure work to all applications, including those beyond SSO, providing full visibility and last-mile protection for unmanaged applications, such as GenAI apps, closing gaps left by incomplete identity coverage. We further solidify this best-in-class security through additional cutting-edge innovations: Advanced Web Protection for real-time evasive threat protection, Advanced Browser Protection for zero-day browser exploitation defense, and Advanced Extension Security for runtime extension security.

At the core of this defense is Precision AI, our proprietary engine that combines machine learning, deep learning and generative AI to automate detection, prevention and remediation with industry-leading accuracy. Unlike standard security tools that rely on static signatures, Prisma Browser, powered by Precision AI, inspects live, fully rendered content. It detects evasive phishing attempts (such as AI-generated cloaking) and malicious reassembly attacks that legacy tools miss, effectively fighting AI with AI. Fueled by intelligence from over 70 thousand customers, Prisma Browser delivers unmatched threat detection, identifying and blocking up to 8.95 million new and unique attacks every single day.

The Frost Report says this about Palo Alto Networks Innovation:

Key differentiating capabilities include last-mile data leakage protection with browser-level visibility; AI-powered web attack detection and prevention with full page runtime visibility; detection and disabling of malicious extensions using behavioral monitoring; an advanced AI-powered DLP engine; in-browser anti-exploit protection; and a rich library of AI applications and agents.

Crucially, Enterprise DLP capabilities are embedded directly into the rendering engine, granting granular control over sensitive data that traditional network-level tools effectively miss. This helps ensure that data on both managed and unmanaged devices remains secure against exfiltration via clipboard restrictions, screenshot blocking, real-time redaction and more, without disrupting the user experience.

Prisma Browser’s Growth Advantage

Central to the widespread adoption of Prisma Browser is our proven ability to secure the managed workforce at scale without disrupting daily workflows. One of our key differentiators is our 100% license portability, which allows organizations to deploy Prisma Browser across their entire fleet of devices, whether as full browsers, extensions, mobile solutions and firewall connectors with complete flexibility. This frictionless deployment model enables IT teams to instantly layer enterprise-grade security and unified policies onto the same native browser UX employees already know and use.

For CISOs and CIOs focused on streamlining operations, Prisma Browser is also offered as a fully integrated solution within the Prisma^® SASE platform, enabling unified policies across all Palo Alto Networks solutions.

Looking Ahead

While we are proud of our position on the Frost Radar: Zero Trust Browser Security (ZTBS) report, we are just getting started. By accelerating initiatives in GenAI security, complete web protection, modern data protection and VDI reduction, we are redefining the browser. We don't just want the browser to be where you work; we are transforming it from the primary attack vector into one of the organization's most robust lines of defense and the single point where they can identify AI driven attacks and fight AI with AI.

Read the full Frost Radar: Zero Trust Browser Security (ZTBS), 2025 report to explore the details behind our market leadership. Then, schedule a demo to witness how Prisma Browser transforms your primary workspace into your strongest line of defense.

The post Redefining Workspace: Prisma Browser Secures Leadership in Frost Radar appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.