Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform provides holistic risk deduction with zero trust architecture

The leading global manufacturer of semi-trailers, trailers, and motor vehicle bodies for temperature-controlled freight will combine Zscaler Internet Access™ (ZIA™) and Zscaler Private Access™ (ZPA™) to create a holistic, high-performance zero trust security environment to power a cloud-only, work-from-anywhere (WFA) business model.

Schmitz Cargobull is deploying Zscaler as the foundation of its overall digitalisation and transformation initiative to modernise the company’s IT security infrastructure by migrating it to the cloud. ZIA is providing secure access to the internet for all staff while ZPA will be supplying VPN-free secure access to internal apps for the company’s mobile employees who work remotely.

With Zscaler, Schmitz Cargobull gains a multi-layered security approach and encrypted traffic inspection to protect against fast-moving threats. The deployment also furnishes a least privileged access model, which uses policies and identities to control and secure the company’s IT environment. This ensures users can only access the applications they need, while automatically achieving network micro segmentation for shrinking Schmitz Cargobull’s attack surface. Further, Zscaler’s more than 150 globally distributed data centres put the company’s workers in proximity to Zscaler points of presence (POP) for reduced latency and enhanced performance.

“It’s critical to provide our employees with a secure and highly available working environment by guaranteeing them secure access to applications in the cloud and the internet at all times, while reducing our exposure,” said Michael Schöller, Head of Infrastructure at Schmitz Cargobull AG. “This includes always-on access to our business-critical ERP system, which previously was jeopardised by access failures. To do all of this, we rely on a multi-layered approach, which increases security.”

In addition, adopting the Zero Trust Exchange platform enables Schmitz Cargobull to replace its existing decentralised, manually-administered security systems with a highly integrated zero trust solution that automatically applies up to 200,000 security updates daily, saving on resources and costs. “As we wanted to reduce the use of maintenance-intensive appliances in the course of our digitalisation, only a cloud-native solution was right for us,” Schöller said.

By using ZPA instead of hardware-based VPNs, Schmitz Cargobull ensures its private applications are never exposed to the internet, making them completely invisible to unauthorised users. This not only improves the company’s security posture but also enables it to extend access to external users for greater business agility and a more secure supply chain.

“Reducing VPN appliances, which have recently made headlines for vulnerabilities, will allow us to increase the availability of our supply chain and access for our consultants,” Schöller said. “Zscaler will keep our infrastructure hidden from attackers while making us more secure than we were before.”