TOYOTA GAZOO Partners with Zscaler to Safeguard Data and Users in Extreme Remote Environments

Zscaler, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS), the leader in cloud security, announced today that TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team Oy (TGR-WRT) is using the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange™ cloud native security platform to protect users, applications, and data across its global operations and rally stages all over the world. Based in Jyväskylä, Finland, the high-performance, competition-oriented company constantly evolves technologies beyond world-level rallying for innovations for the automotive industry.

TGR-WRT runs major programs for the World Rally Championship, Customer Motorsport, and Young Driver Development. As the organization operates in extreme and often remote locations across the globe, enabling secure, high-performance access to the internet and private applications was a major challenge for the IT team. TGR-WRT connects to a combined 100 services, encompassing file storage, SaaS applications, private custom applications for their sensitive engineering and testing data. The fast-growing organization realized that its traditional security infrastructure, consisting of VPNs and firewalls, was neither agile nor secure enough to serve its needs. When TGR-WRT adopted a cloud-first strategy as part of its push for modernization, the organization was also looking for more efficient connectivity for its users on the rally stages and in branch offices, with an improved security posture through a zero trust approach.

The security team began its zero trust journey by collaborating with Mintly, a Finnish technology integrator, who recommended Zscaler to meet TGR-WRT’s unique requirements. After a successful proof of concept, TGR-WRT worked closely with Mintly to deploy the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform on a tight schedule. The comprehensive cloud-native zero trust security platform now enables fast, secure connections between users, branches, applications, and workloads, anywhere and on any device.  It acts as a switchboard, connecting users directly to applications and other resources—not to the network—thereby reducing the attack surface and eliminating the risk of lateral movement.

“Zscaler is one of the best decisions we have made,” said Riku Nykänen, Information Security Officer at TGR-WRT. “The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange simplifies our security architecture. It’s at the core of our protection for all network traffic from our on-premises and cloud servers and the laptops and mobile devices that our teams use at rallies, test events, airports, and homes around the world. This comprehensive security platform makes our users happy because it is easy to use and gives them seamless, uninterrupted connectivity. It makes a difference in our races where every tenth of a second counts.”

During a rally, it is critical to get data packages as quickly as possible from cars to all relevant persons so it can be analyzed for optimizing the performance and reliability of the vehicles. With the help of Zscaler, TGR-WRT built an environment where this highly sensitive data can be sent seamlessly and securely across these different locations. 

TGR-WRT deployed Zscaler for Users with Zscaler Internet Access™ (ZIA™) to grant users zero trust access to the internet and SaaS applications from anywhere and on any device. ZIA brokers secure connections between users and applications based on identity, context, and business policies. With TLS/SSL traffic inspection and AI-powered defenses, it protects all users across various stages of the attack chain to prevent compromise, eliminate lateral movement of threats, and prevent data loss. Additionally, TGR-WRT replaced its unreliable VPN with Zscaler Private Access™ (ZPA™) for seamless and secure access to private applications from any device and location. Zscaler Digital Experience™ (ZDX™) enables the TGR-WRT help-desk team to detect usability issues, pinpoint root causes, and act swiftly to remediate problems to ensure a superior user experience.

The organization also relies on Zscaler Zero Trust SD-WAN’s direct-to-cloud architecture to forward traffic from service parks and headquarters via a branch connector directly to the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform for secure access to applications and the internet. This further reduces complexity of the architecture and adds another layer of data protection by eliminating site-to-site VPNs. In the near future, TGR-WRT plans to implement the Zscaler Client Connector™ app to provide consistent security and faster connectivity for users at rally locations who depend on mobile phones and tablets.

TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team has realized significant gains with the Zscaler solution. From April to June this year, the  security platform helped them to process 262.1 million transactions and 13.7 TB of traffic—a dramatic increase in traffic of more than 1400% from the year before. During this timespan, Zscaler detected and prevented approximately 3 million policy violations.

“Zscaler blew our minds,” said Jussi Luopajärvi, IT Manager at TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team. “User productivity has greatly improved. The time it takes for users to turn on their laptops and start doing productive work has dropped from five minutes to just a few seconds. Network stability and performance in remote locations has also improved, and false positives associated with URL filtering have gone down significantly. Additionally, the firewall issues we had previously have been eliminated.”

About TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team
The TOYOTA GAZOO Racing World Rally Team is based in Finland and a competitor in the World Rally Championship (WRC), serving as the entry for the car manufacturer, Toyota. The team is a separate operational unit of the TOYOTA GAZOO Racing team that competes in the World Endurance Championship, but both are a part of TOYOTA GAZOO Racing Europe. The team has delivered championship titles for drivers and co-drivers every year since 2019.