Three Ways Zero Trust Architecture Made Our Organization Better Beyond Security

The best approach for secure digital transformation 

At the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, our most critical work happens on-location in local communities across the UK, not in a central office behind servers, firewalls, and VPNs. 

We wanted to reduce business risk, enhance our cybersecurity readiness, and empower a workforce as geographically diverse as the communities we serve. To accomplish this, we displaced a traditional perimeter-based security model in favor of the cloud native, comprehensive Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange.

Our zero trust roadmap included some essential benchmarks: become less reliant on legacy appliances, reduce our attack surface, protect users and private applications across any location, improve operational efficiency, and save money.

Attained more than we bargained for with the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange

For us, the Zscaler platform ticks all those boxes in remarkable ways:

✅ Eliminates 100% of our legacy security appliances

✅ Prevents roughly 61.36M policy violations and 418K security threats every year

✅ Gives us 50,000 extra hours of productivity across our workforce annually

✅  Saves £500,000 a year in operating costs

Zscaler has been instrumental to our digital transformation. These results we’ve achieved around security, however, were just the beginning of more profound changes for the DLUHC. Embracing holistic zero trust security has made our organization fundamentally better in ways that transcend security posture. 

I like to say that we got more than we bargained for with the Zero Trust Exchange. 

Zero trust infrastructure enhances sustainability efforts

As a ministerial department, we play a role in working towards the UK government’s environmental sustainability plan. We design initiatives in housing, urban regeneration, and infrastructure that help enhance biodiversity, mitigate climate change, and ensure resource efficiency.

Embracing zero trust has allowed us to move the needle on these objectives—especially around resource efficiency—at an operational level, as well. I mentioned earlier that deploying the Zero Trust Exchange allowed us to eliminate 100% of our legacy security appliances. 

Zscaler has also empowered us to make the move to fully unified communications. Online connectivity is so secure and reliable now that we’ve been able to remove nearly every desk phone from our hardware estate, relying instead on digital resources like Microsoft Teams. 

No longer purchasing or maintaining physical equipment in large volumes reduces our carbon footprint. Displacing roughly three managed providers with the Zscaler platform has reduced our electricity consumption by more than 68,000 kWh per year (187 kWh each day). 

To put that into perspective, the UK’s independent energy regulator Ofgem estimates that the typical UK household consumes 2,700 kWh of electricity each year. Our energy reduction could offset around 25 households annually.

Enhancing user experience and focus with zero trust

When we replaced our previous VPN services with the Zero Trust Exchange, we did so to significantly reduce the attack surface and better protect data and applications. With Zscaler, we’ve not only secured access to our private applications and processes, but also improved the user experience.

The old VPN was a universal source of frustration for staff. Connecting from remote locations was a clunky, time-consuming process with the potential for multiple failure points along the way. Time spent trying and failing to connect for remote work was ultimately time withheld from the life-changing programs our workforce aims to deliver.

We no longer have to stress over that balancing act. As shared earlier, we calculated that Zscaler technology saves our workforce a collective 50,000 hours of staff time each year—time that can now be focused on improving communities across the UK.

Since making the switch to zero trust, we’ve also seen a more than 50% reduction in the number of support desk requests. The intuitive Zscaler interface ensures successful, secure connections with every attempt. Users who can work independently and effectively, with protected time for the most essential projects, become a workforce that is empowered and motivated to deliver mission-focused results.

Check out the full case study to learn more about the DLUHC digital transformation with Zscaler.