When you serve discerning purchasers of luxury goods, data privacy and security are always a top priority. It’s the same at Bombardier, where we create and support business jets that lead our industry in passenger comfort, energy efficiency, reliability, and safety. With a worldwide fleet that currently stands at 4,900 aircraft, our customers include multinational corporations, governments, and private individuals, all of which expect us to keep their data secure.
Our dedication to data security is so fundamental that it plays a starring role in the formal Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) plan that guides our company. This includes working to implement and maintain technology systems that embed security best practices worldwide.
Reducing legacy appliance dependencies
One critical way we’re delivering on our data security commitments is adopting a Zero Trust Architecture that relies on cloud-based solutions such as the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform. This includes rolling out Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) to more than 90,000 employees to provide them with secure connectivity to our public cloud applications like M365 and reduce our dependence on firewalls, which create back doors that can allow threats to enter.
Because many of our employees complete most of their tasks in M365, they no longer need to utilize a VPN. This, in turn, eliminates another back door attack surface by connecting devices to applications and not to our network.
More recently, we also adopted Advanced Cloud Sandbox, which gives AI-powered protection from patient-zero attacks. In addition, we’re adding the sandbox data to the insights we’re collecting from ZIA and then combining these insights with other cloud-based enterprise security solutions, such as Sailpoint for identity governance and administration (IGA) platform, and VMware Carbon Black, for endpoint security.
As Zscaler integrates tightly with all of these solutions, it enables us to optimize our security framework, see threats in real-time, and move away from legacy hardware.
Leveraging Zscaler for multiple ESG goals
But that’s not all. Reducing our reliance on legacy security appliances, like firewalls and VPNs, also contributes to our company’s environmental goals. That’s because Zscaler is committed to using 100% renewable energy sources in its operations, making our operations greener as well. Having a technology partner with a compatible culture is beneficial to the large steps we’re taking to meet our ESG promises, including achieving net zero emissions by 2050 and dedicating more than 50 percent of our R&D investments toward designing and producing greener aircraft.
Zscaler also contributes to another critical ESG goal, which is to support employee engagement by introducing programs that enhance employee experiences and empowerment, including flexible work environments. Zscaler is directly enabling our new Flexible Work Policy, which is significantly expanding opportunities for remote work once we’re beyond COVID-19 restrictions.
In IT, Zscaler is improving employee engagement by proactively identifying threats and blocking them, which reduces the work required to remediate attacks and, as a result, enables us to focus attention on other job functions.
Zero Trust expansions on the horizon
Looking ahead, we’re planning to evaluate other Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange solutions for protecting users, devices, workloads, and clouds as we begin a significant migration to Microsoft Azure. This includes expanding our utilization of VPN-free Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) as we work to eliminate our legacy dependencies because a true Zero Trust architecture can’t be fully achieved while relying on firewalls and VPNs.
To learn more, I invite you to read the accompanying case study about our Zero Trust adoption and how our partnership with Zscaler will help take us into the future.
