Nexteer Automotive Leverages the Combined Power of Zscaler and Okta

Nexteer’s Goals and Strategy in its Modernization Journey

Automobile component manufacturers face pressures of global competition and rising customer demand. These pressures can only be met through digital transformation—but only about 5% of manufacturing executives are satisfied with their digital strategies.1 Nexteer is tackling a whole new level of security challenges—including more locations, suppliers, and an interdependent supply chain—all with connectors into Nexteer’s network. Every point of entry into Nexteer needs to be secured, including access by employees, OEM business partners, suppliers, and contractors.

Nexteer Chief Information Security Officer Arun DeSouza conducted an enterprise risk assessment shortly after joining the company. Some of the key areas of focus he identified included loss of intellectual property, cloud computing governance, secure employee onboarding and offboarding, and network security. DeSouza knew that connecting more devices and systems to the internet would raise the organization’s risk of data breaches. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)2 now in effect, privacy is also a major concern for companies doing business in Europe. Depending on the severity, GDPR can penalize 2% to 4% of a company’s revenue. Nexteer is taking these risks seriously with a measured and responsible approach to digital transformation.

To increase productivity and innovation, Nexteer chose to adopt a common set of cloud applications across the organization, including Microsoft Office 365, SAP SuccessFactors, Concur, DocuSign, and Salesforce. The organization needed to minimize risk by automating user lifecycle management and reducing threats by integrating security elements across applications, services, and infrastructure. However, Nexteer is globally dispersed, and it has a disjointed IT infrastructure with multiple software tools being used in different locations. To adopt a “One Nexteer” focus across the entire organization, DeSouza wanted to consolidate the technologies down to those that work seamlessly together and enable cloud transformation.

Reduce Threat Vectors by Integrating Security from Proofpoint and Zscaler

Nexteer’s security model is based on three broad layers: application security, services security, and infrastructure security. The organization relies on Okta to tie identity into every layer: application security, authentication and identity management, and security monitoring. To strengthen email, web and infrastructure security, Nexteer also utilizes services from Proofpoint and Zscaler.

Scaling Security for the Cloud with Zscaler and Okta

As Nexteer began to move to the cloud, it found that its traditional hub and spoke architecture couldn’t handle the sudden spike in cloud application traffic. Its on-premises internet gateways and security appliances were designed to provide real-time visibility, traffic inspection, threat protection, and URL filtering for all internet traffic but could not support direct-to-cloud connections. Backhauling cloud traffic through on-premises device proxies was slowing everything down. DeSouza realized that he could no longer fix the problem by adding more hardware. Instead, he needed to find a security platform that was built for the cloud.

Nexteer deployed Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA), a solution that offers two main components: a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) for better, faster access to cloud applications like Office 365 and a security stack as a service for access control, data protection, and threat prevention.

Zscaler made it possible for Nexteer’s knowledge workers—some of whom travel extensively—to access their cloud applications from any location without performance lags. Traffic is no longer forced through the company’s on-premises internet gateways and security appliances. Zscaler helped Nexteer add or remove branch offices with greater ease and speed than if they had been using device proxies in their data center.

Zscaler Improves the Office 365 User Experience

Slow performance in Office 365 is why Nexteer turned to Zscaler in the first place. The initial data migration from on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers to Office 365 had been choking the network.

Post migration to the cloud, the situation wasn’t much better. Each user’s Office 365 client software opened from 20 to 30 connections to the Office 365 platform, causing performance lags—especially when traffic wasn’t routed to the closest Microsoft data center.

Since deploying Zscaler with Okta, end users enjoy a fast and secure connection to Office 365. Okta manages end-user access to Office 365 through a combination of single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, while Zscaler manages the connections and dedicates 40% of Nexteer’s bandwidth to handle Office 365 traffic.

Zscaler and Okta: Better Together

Integrating Zscaler with the Okta Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)3 enables just-in-time provisioning of users to the Zscaler database as a way of enforcing policies. Ongoing SAML assertions from Okta let Zscaler know that traffic has been authenticated. The system for cross-domain identity management (SCIM)4 integration with Okta helps Zscaler maintain user information, including whether users have changed groups and job roles.

As part of the Okta Integration Network, Zscaler relies on Okta to provide information about users and how to enforce group-level security policy—such as which groups of users should have access to which apps or which groups are authorized to send sensitive customer information over the internet. While original user records are created with SAP SuccessFactors software, Zscaler relies on the centralized identity data from Okta to enforce security policies.