Transcript
We have around 1,000 locations, 130 factories and 30,000 employees. We looked at how we were working and we allowed our users to do nearly everything at home, but then when they came into the office we had a lot of complexity. So that's where we defined the idea to go to a full internet-based environment, which would imply removing firewalls and SD-WAN everywhere. AXA Nobel has already moved all remote users to the Zero Trust Access model, but that's across the globe. But we had zero complaints. Now we're working on moving all our manufacturing sites towards the Zero Trust Access model. Our transformation goals for the factories is all around productivity, how we can do more automation, the introduction of AI. And then next to that there's also a security component to make sure that the whole OT environment becomes safer than the way it is today. We have the specific challenge of the OT. Some systems are 30, 40 years old. You cannot just put agents on there. So that's where we introduced the Zscaler ZTB technology, which we're now deploying across 122 factories. Traditionally you connect networks to each other or devices to each other, so there's full access from any network, any device, to any other network and any other device. Now all communication will flow to a central switchboard, which can check and secure all communications. If you have a virus or a hacker in your computer, the switchboard will automatically close the connection and segment your device off, improving security. So the Zero Trust Bench not only allows for our devices to connect to the Zero Trust Cloud, even if they don't support the software, but it also allows for remote access to come back into the manufacturing sites. It allows us to micro-segment all the devices that bring a high level of risk. The biggest benefit, at least for the users, is the consistent global user experience that they have. Regardless of their location, the experience is always the same. As it's our goal to move the entire company to a cafe-style model, it takes about one hour for us to migrate all the services and implement the Zero Trust Bench. With this new architecture, you're able to eliminate hardware, routers, firewalls. You're also able to eliminate services or philosophies, for example, patching, lifecycling. We're very proud of the reduction in infrastructure costs that we've been able to achieve. We also took this as an opportunity to really look at the total architecture, where we eliminated quite a few of the management aspects of the network. We had a significant reduction there, and then even with adding some of the Zscaler technology to make sure that we could do all the technology components, there's still a very positive business case. What I'm really proud of is that we had a vision, we had an idea. Many people at the time said, you guys are totally crazy, and nobody's doing that, nobody's thinking about that, but we insisted on doing it. One of the things I asked our CISO to do is try and break it, and the good thing is that he could not find the devices, so basically it also proves that the security is much better with this new technology than the way it was with the firewalls. So no more SD-WAN, no more firewalls, and a significant uplift in terms of total security.
