CSR Limited is a leading building products company and the name behind some of Australia and New Zealand’s most trusted and recognised building products for the construction of homes and commercial buildings. CSR has operations at nearly 200 sites and employs around 4000 people.
Three years ago, CSR was faced with the prospect of requiring a comprehensive IT security upgrade. Existing legacy tools were ageing and no longer able to provide the company with the level of protection it required.
"We needed to upgrade our entire perimeter security including firewalls as well as replace an ageing on-premise content filtering system and a Threat Management Gateway," says CSR Security Architect David Edge. "At the same time, we needed to find effective ways to manage a new breed of web-based security threats whilst allowing users to access an increasing number of cloud-based applications seamlessly and securely.
Edge says the CSR team took the opportunity to step back and take a more strategic view of what needed to be achieved from a security perspective.The team also began the process of aligning the company with the ISO 27001 security standard.
"A key challenge for us was that our corporate IT security policies were not always being effectively enforced," says Edge. "End-point devices were being used to access web-based applications and potentially exposing our infrastructure to threats and we had no way of properly managing this. We needed to find a way to have more consistent application of policies."
After a comprehensive comparative review of a number of potential security solutions, a decision was taken to adopt Zscaler to monitor and manage all internet traffic across the company.
"The fact that Zscaler is a pure-play cloud vendor was a draw card for us," says Edge. "This meant it could remove some of the complexity and management overheads and we could look at new ways to connect our many remote sites to the internet.We were also impressed that it is a genuinely cloud-architected solution, rather than an on-premise solution that just happens to be running on a cloud platform as is the case with some other vendors."
The CSR security team was also impressed by Zscaler's advanced malware detection capabilities. This would allow improved protection for staff who were making increasing use of web-based applications and data services.
The CSR security team is now confident that company policies are being enforced and it has in place a heightened level of protection against malware and advanced persistent threats. The team also has clear visibility of all web-based applications being used regardless of location. This is important when users are spread across 200 different sites in two countries.
Zscaler has removed the overheads associated with managing a traditional on-premise security toolset. Upgrades are handled within the Zscaler cloud and the security team can focus on value-add activities rather than day-to-day maintenance. The use of SAML for autoprovisioning has minimised user account management and ensured a seamless authentication experience.
Since deployment of Zscaler, the number of detected malware infections on end points across the company has declined.
For the more than 800 corporate laptop users across the company, Zscaler has streamlined device management and ensures protection regardless of the location from which they are working.
Zscaler provides an improved ability for analysis of potential threats before any attachments or code is allowed into the corporate network. This has increased confidence that any instances of crypto malware can be dealt with before causing any issues.
Internet traffic from laptop users is sent directly to Zscaler nodes rather than being channelled back through the datacentre. This preserves corporate bandwidth and means less restrictive bandwidth policies can apply to users when off the corporate network. In future, Internet traffic from remote sites will also be directed to Zscaler nodes and this will improve WAN performance.
Zscaler is transforming enterprise networking and security with the world’s largest Direct-to-Cloud Network, which securely enables the productivity benefits of cloud, mobile and social technologies without the cost and complexity of traditional on-premise appliances and software. The Zscaler Direct-to-Cloud Network processes daily more than 10 billion transactions from more than 10 million users in 180 countries across 100 global data centres with near-zero latency. Learn why more than 4,000 global enterprises choose Zscaler to enable end-user productivity, enforce security policy and streamline WAN performance. Visit us at www.zscaler.com.