Probe CX Phases Out Deficient VPNs with Zero Trust to Secure 7,600 Employees and Critical Apps

Safeguarding customer data for rapid growth

“As we innovate to create digitally led customer experiences, our primary concern is to always protect data,” said Rohan Khanna, Chief Technology Officer at Probe CX. “We need to be extremely nimble and flexible for our customers, and we need to have confidence in the security posture we provide to our blue-chip customers in Australia.”

Probe’s initial move to the cloud catalyzed its zero trust strategy, which has matured as the organization has grown both organically and through acquisition. The company expanded from 1,200 staff to 19,000 in six years, with operations in 32 delivery locations across Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, India, and the US.

“A hybrid workforce was a key factor for zero trust access,” said Khanna. “But recent acquisitions also meant that we needed to provide users with consistent and secure access to different applications from anywhere.”

The challenge was that different Probe CX business entities and locations relied on legacy VPNs to remotely access the internet and their on-premises private applications. But as Probe moved more applications to the cloud and as work from anywhere became the norm, VPN usage accelerated—and phishing and ransomware attacks soared. Segmenting the network internally for the 100+ customers with VPNs is a manual, inefficient, and labor-intensive task. Processes for consistency to protect Probe's customers’ digital blueprints, intellectual property, and private data required a more robust system.

Complicating the situation further, different Probe CX entities used different VPN products. That meant the security team lacked unified visibility and end-to-end control and, as a result, could not easily manage security policies across the organization. Additionally, because remote access policies were tied to physical locations rather than customers' specific compliance needs or other requirements, the security team had to manually fine-tune controls to ensure customer traffic was properly segmented. 

Seeking a cloud native zero trust platform

With most of its applications now in the cloud, Probe CX wanted to provide its hybrid workforce with fast, secure application access from anywhere without backhauling traffic to a distant data center. As it evaluated zero trust solutions, the company had three core requirements: a cloud native platform, simplification of the security environment, and integration into its digital ecosystem. 

“We were looking for value for our money, but equally, we wanted a mature zero trust platform that would meet our overall enterprise architecture goals and uplift our security posture,” said Khanna. 

Fast, secure application access for a growing workforce

“Our key finding was that Zscaler had the product capabilities and maturity we needed,” said Khanna. “Zscaler is inherently built to scale for organizations of any size, and its ability to interoperate and integrate with the existing technology we had within the business was extremely beneficial.”

The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange is a cloud native platform that connects and secures users, workloads, IoT/OT, and B2B partners over any network and from any location. It connects entities directly to apps they are accessing, without extending the network to anyone or anything.

To advance its zero trust strategy, Probe CX first rolled out Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) to provide its workforce with safe, fast internet and SaaS access.

As the company grew through acquisitions and moved more private applications to the cloud, it rolled out Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) for zero trust network access. ZPA eliminates the hassles and risks of using traditional VPNs and provides Probe CX staff with the fastest, most secure access to their private apps.

“A key benefit of implementing Zscaler is we’re on track to get rid of 100% of our VPNs,” said Khanna. “In terms of productivity, the time it takes our users to log in to systems is much faster than it’s ever been.”

In the first three months, Zero Trust Exchange, Zscaler detected and blocked more than 3.1 million threats in 285 TB of traffic, including threats hiding in encrypted traffic.

Improving employees’ digital experience

Probe CX also wanted to gain visibility into its users’ digital experience as they worked from anywhere. To achieve this, the company adopted Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX).

ZDX proactively monitors and provides detailed metrics into the digital experience of every user, application, department, and location, so IT can rapidly fix application, network, and device issues. With the power of the Zero Trust Exchange, IT can simply add digital experience monitoring using the same agent and avoid the complexity of adding and managing another point product.

As Probe CX looks ahead, it can easily add other Zero Trust Exchange capabilities, such as Zscaler Data Protection for cloud-delivered protection of its sensitive data everywhere. 

Simplifying the security ecosystem

The Zero Trust Exchange has allowed Probe CX to strengthen its security posture while simplifying its zero trust security ecosystem. It has eliminated VPNs entirely and reduced firewalls in its data centers, minimizing risk and freeing up IT resources. The IT team can holistically define, manage, and enforce zero trust policies across applications and different business entities with less effort than ever.

“Zscaler has allowed us to significantly simplify security policies or rules within the business as our users work from anywhere, which gives us an advantage over our competition because we have a stronger security posture,” said Khanna.

As a framework, Zero Trust Exchange integrates with Probe CX’s other technology partners to support an end-to-end zero trust solution. “A cohesive digital zero trust ecosystem gives us better value because we’re not operating in silos, but collectively for the enterprise,” Khanna said.

Zscaler integrations include Okta for single sign-on (SSO) and multifactor authentication (MFA), VMware SD-WAN for optimized and secure connectivity, and Rapid7 for security information and event management (SIEM) and extended detection and response (XDR). 

Delivering economic value with zero trust

The move to the Zero Trust Exchange has delivered clear economic value, according to Khanna.

“When we did the business case for zero trust, our initial perception was that it would be 30% higher in terms of cost,” he said. “One of the key things we realized is that because of reduced IT labor, security simplification, and lower opportunity costs, putting zero trust into our environment has actually delivered a lower TCO than our previous solution.” 

Zero trust helps speed mergers and acquisitions

Probe CX is growing through acquisition, most recently buying an AI and automation specialist to supercharge its customer experience and business process outsourcing services. Success in mergers and acquisitions is driven by how much faster synergies are realized, and Probe CX views the Zero Trust Exchange as a great enabler in accelerating synergies and a key component of its integration toolkit to accelerate time to value as it reduces integration efforts from months or years to weeks to days.

“Mergers and acquisitions are a huge part of what Probe CX does, and we need to make sure that our enterprise architecture and security framework keep pace as we grow,” said Khanna. “A primary use case for Zscaler is the ability to provide secure access to various applications as we merge brand-new entities.”