iboss Enables Fortune 500 Multinational Corporation to Embrace Zero Trust Model

This multinational corporation, listed on the Fortune Global 500 for more than 20 years, has many business segments across heavily regulated industries, including automation, energy, power, and manufacturing. Founded over 100 years ago, the company serves many industries including life sciences, oil and gas, solar, wind, and infrastructure. Fortune has previously named them one of the top 10 companies to help change the world.

With locations around the world in over 100 countries, this company operates in heavily regulated countries including the Middle East, Russia, and China. It required consistent security and visibility across all businesses and locations, including adherence to strict data privacy regulations that vary from country to country. Its diverse global operation had many proxy appliances that were highly expensive to maintain and service. Protecting data was critical, especially as information must often stay within country borders.  Moreover, security needed to include objects that accessed corporate data, such as including IoT devices. ISPs in regions across Europe and Asia have run out of IPv4 addresses, requiring internet access to be delivered via IPv6; this increased the need to secure IPv6 traffic to extend zero trust across all users and devices in all locations.

Prior to COVID-19, the company wanted to employ a zero trust initiative, eliminate appliances, and enable employees to connect directly to cloud applications. With 800 firewalls, the customer aimed to centralize security functions and better manage incoming and outgoing traffic. The organization sought increased visibility and improved control over user access to cloud applications, regardless of where a user was located.  In addition, the company had important security initiatives:

• Replace Cisco CWS with a cloud solution to eliminate appliances and data backhaul, given that CWS reached end of life in 2020
• Transition to a zero trust model for greater control over user access to cloud apps
• Offer large employee base in China and other countries global cloud security without impacting performance

The company deployed the iboss Zero Trust SASE in more than 100 countries, resulting in one of the largest security cloud deployments in the world.  The organization seamlessly migrated to the cloud and conducts billions of transactions daily. With an almost 100% cloud environment, including highly complex regions with strong regulatory data compliance oversight, they easily transitioned feature-for-feature and policy-for-policy from its existing Cisco CWS without impacting business operations. “iboss Zero Trust SASE stood out and has a roadmap aligned with our future plans,” explains a Senior Vice President at the organization. With iboss’ purpose-built security cloud, the company transitioned within months – not years – with minimal impact to the business. Moreover, employees now have a better end-user experience with increased productivity while it eliminated VPNs and proxy appliances from global locations.

The company also believes security and capital expenditure considerations are big advantages with the platform. With iboss’ cloud architecture, the organization retained its IP address space to enable IP whitelist migration from third-party businesses – all while extending cloud app security with user-based restrictions to those apps with no additional expense or complexity. The company attained a single pane of glass for policies and reporting while managing log data across geos from within the iboss Zero Trust SASE platform. IT can also ensure regulatory compliance, as data often must stay within each country’s borders.

Increased governance, compliance, security and visibility across all aspects of the business regardless of where employees were working or their location, combined with substantial cost savings, enabled the company to retire more than $10 million of equipment and gear by transitioning to iboss. They have a massive security edge and extensive deployment with which users can directly connect to cloud applications, significantly reducing bandwidth and infrastructure expenses. Further, iboss’ architecture enabled the company to utilize zero trust edge policy enforcement points from anywhere, regardless of country location, while maintaining GDPR compliance. The need for proxy appliances deployed in virtually every country was essentially eliminated after implementing iboss.

Moving to a zero trust model ensured users could use Microsoft 365 and Teams without compromising bandwidth. Employees no longer struggled with connections, speed, or performance.

From start to finish, the iboss support team ensured the customer was successful in all locations and treated any issues as their own. “Support was amazing,” the customer continued. “The entire team, including iboss’ CEO Paul Martini, was fully engaged. iboss is well positioned to adapt and embrace security changes for global organizations.”

• iboss enabled this highly complex environment with 100,000 employees in more than 100 countries to deploy to the cloud
• Private and public clouds secured within six months
• Company eliminated more than $10 million worth of equipment and infrastructure while processing billions of transactions per day
• The iboss Zero Trust SASE seamlessly delivered effective migration from the incumbent solution to the cloud and helped the customer eliminate VPNs
• Users gained faster connections and consolidated security policies across all subdivisions and every continent
• iboss’ ability to retain their IP addresses better supported the organization’s rollout of a zero trust initiative
• The organization realized better end user experiences, improved productivity, and continued GDPR compliance
• Proxy appliances were virtually eliminated from worldwide locations
• The ability to manage log data across geos seamlessly from within the interface simplified regulatory and business compliance
• Every country location can address unique encryption requirements