As a fast-moving global consumer goods company operating in 25 countries across Asia and Africa, the products in our brand portfolio touch the lives of one in three Indians. That’s why our technology infrastructure – and most importantly, the cybersecurity that underpins operations – is one of our top priorities here at Marico.
But beyond security, our company is committed to maintaining our culture of empowerment and innovation, requiring cybersecurity protections that are flexible and customisable enough to enable our workers to focus on their work rather than how they access their applications. This led us to adopt the cloud-native Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange.
Partnering with Zscaler enabled us to rapidly roll out Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) to 3,000 users and replace our VPNs with Zscaler Private Access (ZPA). We also deliver seamless and high-performance access experiences whether a worker is on-site or off with ZPA Private Service Edge.
For our journey, we took three key steps that we’d like to share.
Step 1: Used a culture-centric approach
When we started down the path of zero trust – which is based on least-privileged access and the principle that no user or application should be inherently trusted – we were concerned about jeopardising our culture of empowerment and placing unnecessary restrictions on employees in terms of access on their work devices.
That’s why a solution like Zscaler, which strikes a balance between securing data and permitting acceptable activity, was the right choice for providing flexible, granular controls without negatively impacting our users’ experiences.
Step 2: Adopted a comprehensive, easily-managed solution
After evaluating multiple options, we determined that a platform providing a comprehensive and integrated ecosystem of solutions would free us from the limitations of adopting multiple point products.
With the Zero Trust Exchange, we eliminate the complexity of working with multiple vendors and the inherent challenges of ensuring on-demand expandability and scalability. The Zscaler roadmap ensures we can evolve our security infrastructure as new needs develop to stay ahead of advanced threats.
Although, historically, when a company made a cybersecurity investment, it also had to increase headcount to manage the resulting technology complexity, with the Zero Trust Exchange, we gained a SaaS-delivered solution that only needs one IT person to manage, providing significant cost savings to the business.
Step 3: Insisted on tight integrations with neighbouring solutions
Because no security solution exists in a vacuum, it’s vital that your zero trust access platform tightly integrates with your surrounding environment. For example, it should include advanced API-enabled connections to your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) to ensure event logs and other data transfers seamlessly to accelerate security incident management and remediation.
Similarly, smooth integration with your identity management application helps keep application performance high and ensures the delivery of exceptional user experiences without compromising on security.
The Zero Trust Exchange provides us with all of this, as well as many other critical IT and business applications, including getting the most out of our Microsoft Azure cloud environment and M365.
For a more in-depth discussion of our deployment, I invite you to read the accompanying case study that details how our zero trust journey – in partnership with Zscaler – is helping us achieve our business goals.
