Those who know me are aware that I’m a Star Wars fan. What they may not know is that sometimes I feel like I’m living in a Star Wars universe, where the forces of good battle the forces of evil on a daily basis. Those of us in the field of cybersecurity are fighting not just against the bad guys, we are also fighting against “machines.” Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and all the great technology that we use to make good things happen is being turned against us by the bad guys.
It’s a constant battle, and if we don’t stay vigilant and use the right tools to prevent cyberattacks, our organizations will suffer the consequences. I think about prevention daily because I know that every day, as the attack surface grows, the risks grow too.
A new approach for a new cyberthreat landscape
My company, Mobility ADO, was founded in 1939, running six buses between Mexico City and Veracruz. Now we have grown to employ more than 7,000 people in eight countries. Our highly distributed infrastructure is increasingly reliant on cloud resources. As we grew through acquisition and folded in new companies with disparate IT environments, it became clear that our old hub-and-spoke architecture was simply not suited for our rapidly expanding infrastructure. Not only that, but we were aware that the bad guys were getting really good at bypassing traditional security with ransomware, zero-day malware, and advanced threats.
Early on, we knew that we needed to build a zero trust architecture, so we converged our cloud security onto one security service edge (SSE) platform to support our fast growth. And that’s why we deployed Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA), which gives us AI-powered protection from many angles—from phishing detection that identifies domain fronting to enabling cloud browser isolation when users access suspicious URLs to quarantining unknown files for hidden threats.
When we deployed ZIA for the first time, our users saw an immediate boost to their internet speeds and ease of access to the SaaS applications they use to do their jobs. This really opened our eyes to how much our high-maintenance legacy infrastructure had been weighing down our operations before.
Trillions of threat signals analyzed with AI
Not only do our users have a better, faster internet experience, they are also more secure. Behind the scenes, our traffic is being routed through the Zscaler cloud, which is monitored by security pros 24/7. Always-on SSL traffic inspection helps us detect and stop threats buried in encrypted traffic. And a real-time updated, AI-powered data protection service analyzes trillions of threat signals from all over the world to stop advanced attacks based on that threat intelligence.
This summer alone, we’ve blocked 42,509 security threats. That’s an average of 472 threats blocked per day. I like to say Zscaler is like aspirin. It eliminates security headaches.
Making good people into better employees
Zscaler has not only provided us with a strong arsenal for detecting and preventing cybercriminal activities, it also minimizes cybersecurity incidents by helping us prevent risky user behavior. We know that the majority of our users have good intentions, but sometimes they do things that may open the door to threats—like inadvertently visiting malicious websites or trying to access unsanctioned apps. And, from my experience, I can tell you that this can occur at every level—from point-of-sale to the C-suite. Thanks to Zscaler’s policy enforcement, our people can only use the applications they need to do their jobs, and they can only visit authorized sites. As a result, we’ve prevented 25.4 million policy violations over a three-month period.
Defenses that work in the midst of rapid growth
Zscaler is also helping us to scale. Its cloud-based architecture makes it fast and easy to integrate new mergers and acquisitions into our infrastructure. To give you a sense of how quickly we are growing, our network traffic has increased from 74.2 TB in 2021 to 135.3 TB in 2022. That’s an 82% increase. Even through our explosive growth, multiple mergers and acquisitions, and embracing a remote/hybrid business model, we have had not one single instance of ransomware. Thanks to Zscaler, the new companies we’ve acquired have the same robust security in place and benefit from the entire scope of protections.
Zscaler has truly helped us hone our Jedi-like powers to protect our organization and people from the real-life Darth Vaders.
Read the case study to learn why Mobility ADO is convinced of Zscaler’s value and ability to scale as their company continues its rapid expansion.
