PSAA case studies
PSAA · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The PSAA is a Palo Alto Networks certification credential. The official certification page listed for it currently returns a 404 error, so the exam blueprint, question count, time limit, passing score, fee, retake policy, and validity period cannot be confirmed from the permitted source. The PSAA case studies are 5 cases and about 4,079 words.
1Sanctioned AI Assistant, Shadow Uploads, and a Tenant-Wide OAuth Grant
Northwind Health (6,200 staff) approved one enterprise generative-AI assistant 90 days ago; it now has 1,800 weekly active users. Three findings cannot be reconciled.
855 words, about 4 min2Four High-Latency Sites in the Middle of an MPLS-to-SASE Migration
Meridian Retail runs 22 sites in 11 countries and is 60% through replacing MPLS hub-and-spoke with a SASE fabric. Each site has two internet circuits and a tunnel to its nearest point of presence.
803 words, about 4 min3Cloud Posture Debt, Console Drift, and a Failed Pipeline Gate
Vantage Logistics runs 480 cloud accounts across AWS, Azure and GCP; 63% of production workloads are containerised on managed Kubernetes. Terraform is the declared deployment path, but the posture tool reports 1,100 high-severity findings and roughly 300 new console-made changes each week.
803 words, about 4 min4Two Night Analysts, 350 Alerts, and a Noisy EDR Rule
Halcyon Financial's SOC ingests nine sources at a 14,000 EPS peak and receives about 350 alerts a day, staffed by two analysts on nights. One EDR rule produces 68% of all alerts and is triggered mostly by an authenticated vulnerability scanner that runs nightly at 01:00; the same rule caught two genuine ransomware precursors last year.
796 words, about 4 min54,200 Non-Human Identities and a Push-Fatigue Pattern
Corvus Manufacturing has 4,200 non-human identities: 2,900 service accounts, 800 CI/CD tokens, 340 vendor integrations and 160 automation scripts. Of the service accounts, 1,900 use credentials older than 12 months, and 340 hold domain-admin or cloud-global-admin equivalent rights.
822 words, about 4 min