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In 2015, Nuffield Health, a UK-based healthcare organization, was preparing to undertake several projects aimed at improving productivity, efficiency, and patient services, while enhancing user experience across its corporate office, hospitals, and gyms. These projects included a migration to Microsoft Office 365 and the introduction of TrakCare, a new electronic health record application. However, the success of these projects was heavily dependent on the performance of Nuffield Health's network, which needed to secure sensitive patient and personal data flowing in and out of its facilities. At the time, Nuffield Health had only one MPLS network link running at 30 MB at each of its sites, which was insufficient for the upcoming projects and the required resiliency. Furthermore, 60% of its traffic was already destined for the internet rather than its data centers, a percentage that would increase significantly once Office 365 was deployed. The team realized that it needed more bandwidth and more resiliency in its network, and it needed to consider the cost and latency resulting from backhauling all that traffic through the data center. It also had to determine the best way to secure all that internet-bound traffic.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was facing significant challenges with its legacy network infrastructure. The agency, which is responsible for conducting independent accident investigations, advocating safety improvements, and deciding pilots’ and mariners’ certification appeals, has a highly mobile workforce that conducts investigations throughout the U.S. in varied environments. However, the requirement to route all traffic through a legacy Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) was not designed to handle an increasingly mobile workforce. This resulted in latency and connection issues, creating a poor user experience and negatively impacting NTSB’s mission. Additionally, the traditional model of routing remote connections through a VPN client, to the agency data center, through a stack of on-premise security devices, and back out through the TIC, where it traversed another stack of security appliances to its destination, was frustrating for remote users and complicated security.

Siemens, a global leader in energy-efficient, resource-saving technologies, was facing a challenge with its traditional hub-and-spoke network architecture. As more and more traffic was being directed to the internet rather than the corporate network, the company realized the need to rethink its network architecture. The goal was to fully leverage cloud applications like Microsoft Office 365 and platforms like Azure and AWS. With a massive user base of over 350,000 users and more than 30,000 contractors spread across 2,200 offices in 192 countries, Siemens required a solution that was not only scalable and elastic but could also adapt to constantly changing requirements.

General Electric (GE), a global powerhouse that generates a third of the world's energy, manages 90 percent of the electrical grids with its software, and powers two-thirds of all commercial aircraft with its engines, was facing a significant challenge. With 425,000 active users across 4,000 locations in more than 180 countries, GE processes approximately 3.5 billion transactions daily. However, the company's network had become increasingly complex and costly to maintain. Usage demands were mounting, data and applications were moving to the cloud, and the company was struggling to keep pace with 50,000 cybersecurity attacks every day. The need for a more efficient, secure, and cost-effective network solution was evident.

In 2014, the sharp decline in oil prices led to a significant reduction in IT spending at NOV, a global provider of equipment for the oil industry. The company's CIO and CISO, Alex Philips, was faced with the challenge of upgrading the company's outdated security appliances and maintaining its legacy MPLS network, both of which were financially untenable. The company had already begun its cloud migration by adopting Microsoft Office 365 and moving internally managed applications to AWS and Azure. However, the challenge was to establish local internet breakouts at its 635 locations in 66 countries, which was a complex and costly task. Additionally, the company needed to replace its risky and cumbersome VPN technology to ensure fast, secure access to internal applications.

The Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture (ARMA) was established in 1994 to support the development of agriculture and rural areas in Poland. As an accredited paying agency, ARMA processes applications, verifications, and other forms, as well as paying refunds for more than 2 million farmers and others in the agricultural industry throughout Poland. ARMA was faced with the challenge of enabling its growing mobile and remote workforce to work securely and efficiently. The solution needed to provide a secure and stable connection to their applications when working away from the office. The challenge was further intensified by the global pandemic, which necessitated a quick shift to remote work for all employees.

The largest local government agency in the U.S., a California County government, was faced with the challenge of rapidly adopting a scalable zero trust network access solution to enable a smooth transition to a Work-From-Anywhere (WFA) model due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The County, with 110,000 employees and over 12 million citizens, had to secure data for a significant number of remote employees almost overnight. The County operates as 36 autonomous groups, each with its own IT staff and technology applications, except for services like cybersecurity. The challenge was to quickly secure access to thousands of applications, for which the cybersecurity team had no prior visibility.

Cenitex, a Victorian public-sector organization providing IT support and advice to various state government agencies, faced a significant challenge in its service delivery. The senior management team realized that their existing operating methods were no longer effective and couldn't meet the organization's changing requirements. They needed to increase their use of cloud-based resources to meet the demand for improved flexibility. The need to support Office 365, which caused network load performance issues as it came online for Cenitex’s customers, was a significant part of this challenge. The organization was also suffering from reliability issues within its ageing data centre infrastructure. Additionally, the centralised model Cenitex used to route data traffic from some 450 customer sites across Victoria was causing performance issues and meant there was a single point of failure that could cause service disruptions.

Ciena, a global networking systems, services, and software company, faced a dual challenge. The CEO, Gary B. Smith, tasked the IT team with increasing employee engagement levels, particularly during daily meetings. The team identified video conferencing as a potential solution, following positive feedback from peers who had seen a significant rise in engagement when video was used for internal meetings. However, implementing video conferencing across Ciena's 70+ global locations, coupled with the growing volume of traffic accessing cloud-based applications, posed a significant challenge. The company's existing hub-and-spoke topology was not equipped to handle this increased demand, leading to concerns about network strain and potential security issues.

The City of Boston, like many cities across the country, was working to reduce its data center footprint and shift its infrastructure, applications, and data to the cloud. The goal was to provide responsive, modern citizen services. However, as the city relied more on web-based applications and infrastructure, new challenges arose. The existing internet security solution was inefficient and unreliable. It was increasingly important to ensure employees could safely access web-based applications and data. The city needed a secure, scalable, cost-effective cloud access for its 5,500 users to improve workflow efficiency and reduce user frustration. The city was also looking to shift to a cloud security platform and adopt a zero trust approach.

Coca-Cola Consolidated, the largest bottler of Coca-Cola products in the United States, faced a significant challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company, which serves over 66 million consumers and operates in more than 110 locations across 14 states, had to ensure the safety of its over 17,000 employees by encouraging them to work from home. This shift presented a communications challenge for the company, which heavily relies on Microsoft Teams and other latency-sensitive applications for internal communications. Traditional VPN connections often reported latency, which could affect Office 365 productivity. The IT team had to remove as many variables as possible to provide remote workers with a safe and predictable user experience, one that is comparable to or better than at the office—especially for Office 365 because the Company is so heavily dependent on this suite.

The Commonwealth Grants Commission (CGC), an independent statutory body advising the Australian Government on financial assistance for states and territories, was facing a significant challenge with its aging access infrastructure. For several years, the CGC’s staff had relied on a secure internet gateway (SIG) service based on a 10Mbps network link. This SIG was the only link with the outside world, and congestion and performance had gradually become a significant issue. The move to the cloud was part of an 'anywhere, anytime, any device' strategy adopted by the organization to maintain business continuity and rapidly support staff wherever they may be located. There was also a plan to shift into new premises in about 18 months and a need to improve performance to access cloud-based solutions.

DB Schenker, a global logistics and freight-forwarding company, faced a significant challenge when the coronavirus outbreak began. The company had to quickly enable the majority of its 76,000+ workforce to work remotely, ensuring their safety while maintaining business continuity. The company's operations span over 80 countries and 1400+ locations, making the task even more complex. The immediate concern was how to facilitate remote access for its employees, particularly those affected by the outbreak in China. The company's existing IT infrastructure and legacy network architecture were not equipped to handle such a massive shift to remote work.

Fairfax County, located in Northern Virginia, is the most populous county in the Commonwealth of Virginia with over 1.1 million citizens and more than 12,000 government employees. The county oversees a wide range of services including elections, tax collection, public education, social services, law enforcement, fire and rescue, transportation, and parks and recreation. With the rise in cyberattacks, especially those targeting the government sector, Fairfax County recognized the need to reimagine its security strategy. The county had hundreds of applications in the data center and in Azure that needed to be protected. The county wanted to reduce its network attack surface and decrease the risk of breaches by protecting east-west traffic inside the data center. The next generation firewalls (NGFWs) it was using to protect its data were becoming suboptimal, with hundreds of applications resulting in thousands of policies and creating unnecessary complexity. With a small, centralized IT team, Fairfax County needed to minimize complexity with a zero trust solution that was easy and seamless to deploy, monitor, and manage.

Falkirk Council, a unitary authority in Scotland, was faced with the challenge of rapidly transitioning its cybersecurity to a zero trust, cloud-centric approach in support of work-from-anywhere (WFA) model due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The council, responsible for a wide range of services for its 160,000 residents, had to modernize its existing cybersecurity solutions to accommodate the sudden shift to remote work and learning. The existing IT systems were strained under the load of the increased demand, and the council was looking for an effective way to use taxpayer funds to enhance its systems. Falkirk Council had already conducted a proof-of-concept (POC) with the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform as part of a larger initiative for transitioning to a hybrid cloud and on-premises IT environment.

Fareportal, a leading travel agency based in North America, transitioned from a traditional paper-based booking system to an online platform. With this digital transformation, the company faced an increased emphasis on security due to the handling of personally identifiable information. The challenge was to ensure the security of customer data and reduce fraud while maintaining the productivity of the employees. Internet access was a critical tool for Fareportal’s agents, which required the creation of unique policies for various groups in the contact center and throughout the organization. The company needed a solution that could handle the complexity of their internet access and meet their operational needs without straining their team.

GROWMARK, a large agricultural cooperative, faced significant challenges in providing zero trust access to hundreds of applications hosted on AWS and on-premises. The company had to upgrade its VPN public interfaces and technology to accommodate its remote and hybrid workforce operating in over 500 rural locations with often unreliable internet service. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated these challenges, necessitating a swift transition to a secure, reliable, and scalable remote work environment. GROWMARK also sought to tie access to identity and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to gain better visibility into online user activities. The company also aimed to replace its legacy VPN technology with a solution that could better support its remote, rural, connectivity-challenged workforce.

Guild Mortgage, a residential real estate mortgage company, experienced exponential growth since its inception in 1960. With over 250 branch and satellite offices in 27 states and banking relationships in 48 states, the company's workforce grew from 400 to over 4,000 employees. This rapid expansion necessitated a robust security strategy to support the growing business needs. Three years ago, a security team was formed to identify vulnerabilities and build a mitigation strategy. While some security technologies were in place for in-office workers, the team found that users were not as protected when working remotely. The team aimed to implement a state-of-the-art security program that could support the evolving business needs driven by their aggressive growth strategy. They needed a cloud-based solution that could provide SSL decryption and inspection, an intrusion prevention system (IPS), and data loss prevention (DLP) to enable users to work from anywhere.

The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine (HJF) is a nonprofit organization that supports about 1,500 scientific research programs across military and government. These programs range from cancer research, combat care, disaster preparedness, clinical and rehabilitative medicine to infectious disease control. Amid the global battle against COVID-19, HJF was determined to fight the pandemic on two fronts: supporting domestic and international partners working on innovative countermeasures, and keeping its team and the communities in which they live and serve safe by helping mitigate the spread of the disease. To accomplish this, HJF needed to find a way to provide its staff, researchers, and partners with remote access to critical applications as they transitioned to working from home while continuing to support their colleagues in the labs.

Jefferson Health, a rapidly expanding multi-state non-profit health system, was faced with the challenge of supporting its rapid institutional growth, a cloud-first strategy, and M&A activity in the highly regulated healthcare industry. As one of the fastest-growing health systems in the U.S., Jefferson Health began adopting a cloud-first strategy to facilitate achieving its patient care and business goals. This transition necessitated the modernization of its cybersecurity posture approach. To support its growth while retaining its patient care excellence, Jefferson Health took a highly quantitative approach to managing risk. This analytical process led the healthcare system to accelerate its cloud-first, multi-cloud, adoption, including Amazon AWS, requiring the security operations team to swiftly deploy zero trust cloud security services. It was also critical to ensure cybersecurity posture was maintained while supporting organizational agility for embarking on new development and strategic ventures.

Konoike Transport, a comprehensive logistics company based in Japan, was facing a significant challenge in its digital transformation journey. The company had a mid-term IT strategy that aimed to move its ICT infrastructure to the cloud and enable work style innovation. However, the company was struggling with providing high-speed secure access to the internet, cloud solutions, and internal systems for its employees, regardless of their location. The company initially used three major carriers for WAN, and employees had to sign up to take laptops out of the office, which required complicated settings to ensure security outside the office. As the company expanded, the number of PCs, cloud service usage, and VPN connections increased, leading to bandwidth becoming a bottleneck. The company was also unable to use public Wi-Fi due to its security policy, and the internet processing speed on laptops was slow due to data restrictions.

Kubota Australia, a provider of agriculture, construction, and power equipment, was facing a significant challenge in expanding its warehouse network. The company was experiencing growing demand and needed to provide more parts to more customers promptly. However, the requirement for internet connectivity in the warehouses to allow RF scanners to communicate with the ERP system was proving to be a hindrance. The need for a dedicated wireless network and the logistics of working with potentially different internet service providers at each warehouse location was slowing down the process of making new warehouses operational. The company was seeking a solution to this problem that would allow it to maintain a competitive edge while keeping operational costs low.

National Australia Bank (NAB), one of Australia’s “Big Four” financial institutions, faced a significant challenge in balancing the convenience of online transactions with the need for personal, direct engagement for larger transactions. The bank was also grappling with the strict data-privacy requirements, low risk tolerance, and regulatory constraints typical of the financial services industry. In the mid-2010s, NAB recognized the potential value of migrating to the cloud, particularly for strengthening its security posture. However, the transition was not without its challenges. In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, leading to a surge in customer call volumes and necessitating a shift to remote work for the safety of NAB's employees. This sudden change posed a practical challenge, as not all of NAB's employees were equipped to work remotely.

NEC Corporation, a global business with over 300 group companies worldwide and 110,000 employees, was driving a cloud shift to enable work style innovations and digital transformation (DX). The company aimed to provide comfort and security simultaneously when connecting to the cloud. The challenge was to migrate their network infrastructure, including the internet gateway, to a secure cloud environment. This was necessary to realize a work style that was not constrained by time or place. The company faced difficulties in detecting cyberattacks and malware downloads due to the encryption of web traffic. About 90% of their web traffic was SSL, and approximately 80% of malware communication used SSL, which was often used for cyberattacks. Traditional security solutions that did not support SSL visualization could not detect malware. The company also aimed to ease internet traffic by significantly shifting the IT environment from on-premises to the cloud, ensuring application performance was not interrupted by security regulations and maintaining a user-friendly state even when traffic drastically increased.

Northgate Market expanded to 40 supermarkets through market growth and strategic acquisitions. Its ambitious expansion goals included additional services and capabilities intended to deliver exceptional service to its customers. However, these ambitions were hindered by its aging infrastructure with limited and failing network and security capabilities. Northgate Market was operating on an MPLS network with two T-1 network connections and limited 3Mbps capacity at each location. A wireless 3G LTE network served as a backup when the primary terrestrial network failed. Unfortunately, the network was slow and experienced frequent outages. All internet-bound traffic was backhauled from the individual supermarkets to the two corporate data centers and secured through web content filtering appliances before going out to the internet. This created bottlenecks and negatively impacted user experience as well as the ability for Northgate Market’s associates to deliver excellent service to its customers.

National Oilwell Varco (NOV), a Fortune 500 company supplying technical equipment and services to the global oil-and-gas industry, faced a significant challenge when the entire company had to move to remote access. With operations in over 600 locations and a large computing workforce of 25,000 employees, 70% of whom are mobile with laptops, the shift was not straightforward. The company's fortunes are tied to fluctuating global commodities markets, and after oil prices plummeted in the mid-2010s, the IT team was tasked with doing more with less. They needed to reduce the burden of legacy technical debt, lower historically high costs, add more capabilities, and improve security for their worldwide organization. The company began its transformation in 2016 with a shift to the cloud, away from what CIO Alex Philips describes as 'security appliance hell.'

Powerco, a leading electricity and gas infrastructure business in New Zealand, was faced with the challenge of modernizing its corporate IT infrastructure. The company aimed to transition from a traditional wide area network (WAN) architecture to an internet-only, zero trust strategy across its office locations. This required finding a replacement for legacy web filtering and virtual private network (VPN) capabilities. Additionally, Powerco wanted to change the way its applications were deployed, moving away from the intranet and publishing them behind a secure portal. However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced the company to accelerate its deployment plans, adding an additional layer of complexity to the situation.

Sandvik Group, a global high-tech and engineering company, was facing significant challenges with its traditional virtual private network (VPN) approach to connecting and securing remote workers. The VPN technology was causing productivity and user experience hurdles, as it hadn't evolved much since its introduction. The company was looking for a technology that removed connectivity hurdles and reduced attack surfaces to improve its security posture. The challenge was further intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitated a rapid transition to a work-from-anywhere (WFA) model. The company needed to establish zero-trust network access rapidly and smoothly to enable this transformation.

SICK AG, a global leader in sensors, systems, and services for industrial automation technology, was facing a challenge in modernizing its IT security and driving digitization. The company, which has a significant international presence with over 50 subsidiaries and approximately 10,000 employees, was heavily reliant on sensor intelligence for Industry 4.0 processes. However, the existing four internet gateways in Europe, Asia, and North America were a limiting factor for a cloud-first infrastructure. The company needed a solution that would allow secure internet breakouts at each location and facilitate the exchange of data recorded by sensors via the cloud. In 2015, SICK decided to stop using its existing security hardware and sought a cloud-based solution to drive digitization and modernize its IT security.

Stolt-Nielsen Limited, a global leader in the transportation and storage of specialty chemicals and other bulk liquids, was facing challenges in maintaining a quality user experience for its offices and remote users due to its traditional WAN with MPLS connections. The company found this system to be inefficient and inconsistent with its overall cloud strategy. The MPLS contracts were expensive, had long-term commitments, and made new locations difficult to deploy. The company’s on-premises gateway security solution lacked the flexibility to handle cloud and SaaS traffic, had limited security monitoring functionality, and provided no protection for local breakouts, remote employees, or road warriors. Moreover, the company funneled traffic to a data center in Europe for egress to the internet, causing latency issues for locations in other parts of the world. This resulted in a poor user experience and growing frustration among employees in many locations across the Americas and the AsiaPacific region.