A born-in-the-cloud firm, Mercury Monetary upholds a aggressive benefit within the monetary providers business by way of superior know-how instruments that assist its clients responsibly handle their credit score and provide them credit score as they’ve by no means had earlier than.
Devoted to steady enchancment by way of innovation, Mercury Monetary just lately remodeled its conventional safety structure and constructed a risk-based, cloud-native safety program. Its transformation overhaul was pushed by three causes: compliance with monetary providers rules like PCI DSS, changing conventional VPN know-how to enhance person experiences and visitors visibility, and strengthening safety controls to its Amazon Net Providers (AWS) atmosphere.
To do that, Chief Info Officer Arjun Thusu determined to undertake a zero belief strategy to guard in opposition to potential threats. This was the origin of their Zscaler Zero Belief Alternate™ implementation.
Thusu stated, “The Zscaler Zero Belief Alternate platform offers a complete methodology for zero belief for utility entry. We see Zscaler as a frontrunner on this house as a result of its complete platform covers a number of sides of zero belief. To get the identical functionalities we get from Zscaler elsewhere, we must deploy a number of vendor options.”
Sadly, many organizations resort to the choice and deploy numerous level merchandise that waste price range and sources and sometimes don’t play good collectively.
Deploying Zscaler Web Entry to guard in opposition to as we speak’s threats
Mercury Monetary deployed Zscaler Web Entry™ (ZIA™) as a part of its digital transformation initiative, which protects customers from threats and enhances connectivity, no matter the place they work. With safe direct-to-internet and direct-to-SaaS connections, customers take pleasure in an improved person expertise when accessing internet or SaaS purposes like Jira for software program growth venture administration and Microsoft 365 for basic enterprise use.
The corporate depends on ZIA for risk containment by way of its synthetic intelligence (AI)-powered capabilities equivalent to phishing detection, C2 botnet and evasive risk detection, and suspicious web site identification. As well as, Zscaler Superior Firewall, which is a part of ZIA, follows cellular Mercury Monetary customers wherever they go, offering full inline visitors inspection, detecting encrypted threats hiding in non-standard ports, and always-on intrusion prevention.
Alex Arango, Head of Cyberthreat Administration at Mercury Monetary, believes each gadget its customers deploy needs to be protected like an information heart. He provides that with the addition of an Advance Firewall to ZIA, Mercury now has a materially higher posture wanted to maintain its customers safe.
Changing a clunky VPN with Zscaler Non-public Entry
When the Covid-19 pandemic took the world by storm, the Mercury Monetary workforce wanted to behave quick to maneuver its whole workforce to VPN. The flows and dangers inherent to this strategy shortly turned evident, together with a poor person expertise as a consequence of latency in addition to repetitive logins and authentication. Sadly, the VPNs deployed proved unsustainable over the long run and wanted extra agility required for a distributed workforce.
Mercury turned to Zscaler Non-public Entry™ (ZPA™) to switch its VPN. ZPA offers customers, no matter the place they’re, with quick, seamless entry to non-public purposes that run on AWS.
“For a distant workforce, ZPA provides a seamless expertise, offers vastly improved safety, and reduces the help burden. Implementing ZPA was a powerful success! Executives and different staff can now get protected entry wherever their travels take them and throughout a myriad of units,” stated Chief Info Safety Officer Anthony Cunha.
Integrations with Crowdstrike and Okta assist streamline operations
Mercury noticed the mixing between CrowdStrike and Zscaler as a differentiator and a vital enabler for its zero belief technique. Mercury Monetary is taking full benefit of the Zscaler-CrowdStrike integration to facilitate risk intelligence and telemetry sharing and to broaden the scope of endpoint safety on the community layer.
For instance, Zscaler incorporates the most recent record of indicators of compromise (IoCs) detected by CrowdStrike, equivalent to malicious URLs, and detects and blocks endpoints from threats by proactively blocking these websites.
And to additional broaden its zero belief ecosystem, the corporate adopted many different Zscaler-integrated options, together with Okta for person authentication and entry degree verification. The Zscaler-Okta Safety Assertion Markup Language (SAML) integration authenticates person identities, permits customers entry solely to approved purposes, and mechanically provisions and deprovisions customers as wanted.
“With these Zscaler integrations, we are able to run our operation like an environment friendly multilane freeway, with autos going concurrently in the identical course and on the identical velocity,” stated Jason Smola, Enterprise Safety, and Infrastructure Architect.
Improved productiveness and quick decision instances with Zscaler Digital Expertise
With many staff working remotely, Mercury Monetary wanted an answer to assist discover, troubleshoot, and proper person points. Zscaler Digital Expertise™ (ZDX™) matches the invoice completely, with its means to repeatedly monitor and supply root causes of SaaS-related issues.
Smola goes on to say, “ZDX has elevated information insights, and this allows us to diagnose connectivity points extra simply. Our customers recognize it too as a result of it makes them extra productive by lowering the time required for the assistance desk to resolve issues.”
Deployment made straightforward by Zscaler
One of many issues that stood out for Smola throughout the deployment was the significance of getting a powerful understanding of the community earlier than initiating this architectural shift. He and his workforce completely recognized their most important and beneficial information, property, purposes, and providers. As soon as they’d an excellent deal with on that, the method was clean and environment friendly.
Advantages gained by adopting Zero Belief
The Zscaler zero belief structure has benefited Mercury Monetary in quite a few methods—from curbing threats by lowering the assault floor to rising the effectivity of the small safety workforce.
“Zscaler zero belief has allowed us to carve out our whole infrastructure into insolated segments in order that the extent of compromise is minimal. If an attacker beneficial properties a foothold in our stack, as an alternative of affecting 20 servers, it solely impacts one. As well as, it reduces our blast radius and the potential an infection of east-west motion, so our means to remediate has soared exponentially,” stated Smola.
For the reason that ZTE deployment, Mercury Monetary has had zero downtime as a consequence of malware or ransomware. Moreover, the IT workforce has seen a big discount in help tickets and the person expertise.
The workforce additionally factors out that Zscaler has made them extra environment friendly and given them higher peace of thoughts.
Like what you learn? Are you prepared to begin your transformation journey with Zscaler? If that’s the case, request a demo to see how Zscaler closes safety gaps and helps you safely transfer to the cloud.
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