Trailblazing heroes lead the charge in secure digital transformation

March 27, 2024

27 5 minutes read

As a way to bring real-world cybersecurity transformation stories to life and showcase the achievements of leaders from the world’s top brands, Zscaler published the IT Heroes Comic Series. By taking a lighthearted approach to customer use cases, readers have the opportunity to consume short snapshots of customer journeys on their path to zero trust in a format normally reserved for leisure. The IT Heroes Comic Series is a launching point to then dive into a complementary set of in-depth content in both written and video layouts.

Supporting rapid expansion by simplifying security and achieving greater operational efficiency

MOL Group is an energy company headquartered in Budapest, Hungary with 25,000 employees. It owns around 2,000 service stations scattered across nine countries in Central and Southeast Europe, in addition to three refineries and two petrochemical plants.

The company has been rapidly growing through new lines of business such as electric vehicle charging stations and recycling plants, as well as through mergers and acquisitions. Head of Cybersecurity Strategy and Architecture Tamás Kapócs recognized the need for a new approach to security that would better support the company’s accelerated growth.

Kapócs deployed Zscaler to standardize and simplify the company’s security technologies, policies, and operations, and to provide users with a consistent experience no matter where they work. Zscaler’s single pane of glass relieved the security team of many day-to-day tasks, streamlining operations and giving them more time to work on strategic initiatives.

Not only is the security team happy with the changes, users across the company are delighted that they no longer have to rely on clunky VPNs. Zscaler significantly improved the user experience and decreased help desk tickets. “Zscaler was the logical choice,” Kapócs says. “No other vendor could even come close to the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange.”

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Saving millions over legacy solutions and laying the groundwork for future growth

VP and CISO of United Airlines Deneen DeFiore is charged with protecting the world’s third-largest airline company by fleet size and routes, with 80,000 employees working across 350 locations worldwide and serving 143 million customers annually. If that doesn’t sound challenging enough, DeFiore started the job just six weeks before the pandemic began.

Virtually overnight, she helped take the company’s workforce from in-the-office to completely remote by deploying the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange with Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA), Zscaler Private Access (ZPA), and Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX).

The full zero trust transformation took only six months to complete and saved the organization over 3 million dollars over legacy on-premises solutions. But that was only the beginning of what DeFiore achieved.

“As we grow our fleet of connected aircraft and hire more employees, we need to design our security architecture to deliver the outcomes for the next phase of our business—across people, physical infrastructure, and systems—that will enable us to enhance and automate our operation in the years ahead,” says DeFiore.

The United Airlines Zscaler deployment shifts the organization’s security model from network- to cloud-based and lays the groundwork for IoT/OT device security in future projects. “With an evolving threat environment, we need to continuously adapt and advance our detection and defense-in-depth capabilities with intelligence to remain ahead of the attackers,” says DeFiore. “Zscaler gives us peace of mind that traffic will be secure, regardless of the underlying network, for our employees, customers, and partners.”

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Streamlining an overly complex environment while boosting security

Mindbody is the leading cloud-based online scheduling and business management software for health and fitness service businesses such as gyms, yoga studios, salons, and spas. Since its founding in 2001, Mindbody acquired multiple organizations over the years and has become overly complex to manage.

Deputy CISO Michael Jacobs felt he could no longer rely on the organization’s legacy firewalls and network intrusion detection technologies to keep its users safe. “We needed a solution that provided modern, cloud-native security capabilities and a less complex, easier experience for both users and administrators,” he says.

He deployed the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform to streamline the environment, improve operational efficiency, increase productivity, boost security, and reduce overhead. The 100% cloud-based company is now in the process of transitioning to a fully zero trust model.

Since deploying Zscaler, it has taken half as long as it did before to onboard companies newly acquired through mergers and acquisitions. Another example of how Zscaler has sped things up is that, previously, when a user requested access to a particular application, granting permission took days or even weeks—even with the assistance of senior technical resources. Now any Zscaler administrator can do it in minutes. “Zscaler is helping us get where we want to be,” Jacobs asserts.

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Rapidly enabling tens of thousands of remote workers

When confronted with the sudden challenge of enabling 50,000 municipal employees to work from home in 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Los Angeles Information Technology Agency’s CIO Ted Ross quickly devised a plan. What was it? Deploy the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange across the city’s 44 departments.

Thanks to Ross’s fast thinking, the city was able to keep critical city services—such as emergency and health services, trash collection, and infrastructure repairs—fully operational for its 4 million residents. It took Ross and his team less than two weeks to deploy a remote work platform to 18,000 employees.

These days, city employees are enjoying an improved work-life balance and are spending less time commuting on Los Angeles’ notoriously crammed highways. And, long term, the city is well positioned for potential disruptions with built-in resiliency, thanks to Ross deploying Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) and Zscaler Private Access (ZPA).

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Rescuing rural field offices from spotty internet

As a major natural gas supplier to customers in Arizona, Nevada, and California, Southwest Gas was struggling with spotty internet at many of its remote field offices. Although the company’s operational technology (OT) network is air-gapped, its IT network still needs to provide employees with fast internet connection to critical data and applications.

The company’s legacy system relied on VPNs and backhauling traffic to a data center to apply on-premises security controls. The result was high latency, poor user experience, and questionable security. Senior Infrastructure Architects Robert Woodfin and David Petroski, along with Manager, Network Services Larry Rosenbusch decided to do something about it.

The trio scoured industry analyst reports and evaluated multiple vendors before ultimately choosing the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange. The deployment process was smooth and seamless, requiring only four to six weeks to achieve positive results. “The proof is in the reduction of help-desk tickets,” notes Petroski.

In addition to a vastly improved user experience, this team of IT heroes brought their company a robust integration platform. They integrated Zscaler with Duo for multi-factor authentication (MFA) to streamline administration and confirm user identities and with Splunk to log data and provide rich telemetry into real-time policy violations, vulnerabilities, and potential threats. Thanks to these IT Heroes, natural gas deliveries will be more secure and reliable in the Southwest.