The identify Royal Caribbean conjures up pictures of luxurious cruise ships, top-notch leisure, high quality eating, sandy seashores, breathtaking sunsets, tall tropical drinks.
“Our mission is to create fabulous holidays with nice experiences and nice reminiscences for our crew and our visitors,” says John Maya, vp of operational excellence at Miami-based Royal Caribbean Group.
Past the glitz and glamour, nonetheless, Royal Caribbean has the identical inner techniques as any firm within the journey/hospitality trade – company workplaces, gross sales, advertising and marketing, reservations, name facilities, baggage dealing with, and so forth.
Maya describes his IT infrastructure as hybrid cloud, with some assets hosted on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, but in addition some core techniques, such because the mission essential reservations utility, working on an IBM AS-400 server in an Equinix knowledge middle in Virginia.
Legacy VPN reaches the top of the highway
There are three manufacturers underneath the Royal Caribbean Group umbrella—Royal Caribbean Worldwide, Celeb Cruises and Silversea Cruises—with a complete of 85,000 workers, most of whom work aboard the ships that take vacationers to greater than 300 locations, in all places from Alaska to Australia.
However there are additionally between 8,000-10,000 workers who work at mounted areas, together with company headquarters, workplaces in Europe and Asia, and port operations scattered throughout the globe. There are additionally third-party contractors, and near 1,000 call-center brokers who work out of their properties.
On the cruise ships, visitors and most crew members don’t have entry to the company community, however Maya does have to supply safe distant entry for the captain and different key workers.
They have been all linked to company headquarters via a hub-and-spoke fashion Cisco AnyConnect VPN. Maya stated the VPN was reaching end-of-life, and he was on the lookout for an alternate that would offer higher safety, minimize prices, and a ship a greater consumer expertise.
Zero Belief
Based mostly on discussions with colleagues and his personal experiences at earlier profession stops, Maya entered into discussions with Zscaler, then signed up for the corporate’s Zero Belief Change, a cloud-native platform that securely connects customers to workloads they should do their jobs.
Maya says he’s been “thrilled” with the expertise. “The Zscaler Zero Belief Change allows us to work from wherever—workplace, cruise ship, resort, airplane, Starbucks. It has turn into so ingrained into the environment that it has turn into foundational. We don’t see how we will function with out it,” he says.
For instance, Maya stated finish customers used to have the power to energy up and switch off the VPN at will. He wished a system the place finish customers have been required to undergo Zero Belief-based entry controls for all connectivity. “With Zscaler, we will lock down machine entry to the web and put restrictions on the place individuals can surf. It’s at all times on,” he says.
Prior to now, Royal Caribbean loaned out end-user units to contractors all around the world. “We didn’t do the best job getting that tools again,” Maya concedes. With the brand new system in place, all third events must carry their very own units and have their very own Workplace 365 licenses.
“We put a Zscaler agent on their machine to allow them to entry the community,” he says. Maya’s IT division works with their counterparts at contractors’ corporations to guarantee that agent is working within the background, imposing Zero Belief guidelines for multi-factor authentication and identification and entry administration (IAM).
Safety service edge
With the Zscaler safety service edge (SSE) platform, Royal Caribbean purposes sit behind a cloud-based safety change, and customers hook up with purposes straight. This isolates threats, improves the consumer expertise, eliminates the chance for hackers to invade the community and make lateral actions, and allows the platform to use Zero Belief safety ideas for entry management.
The platform may also conduct subtle safety duties akin to decryption and deep packet inspection of all visitors, blocking malware, and stopping exfiltration of delicate knowledge.
The service has a number of elements, every offering a selected profit to Royal Caribbean:
- Web Entry: Offers quick and safe entry to the web and SaaS purposes. The service performs AI-powered phishing detection, browser isolation, and even detects malicious command-and-control visitors, which might point out that malware has invaded the community and is speaking with the attacker.
- Non-public Entry: Offers safe entry to Royal Caribbean’s non-public purposes, enforces least privileged entry, and likewise conducts inline prevention, deception, and risk isolation.
- Digital Expertise: Analyzes visitors from the top consumer viewpoint and is ready to troubleshoot and resolve consumer points. For instance, Maya says that it supplies enhanced visibility into the exercise of call-center brokers all the way down to the extent of monitoring knowledge flows and visitors hops.
Zero Belief advantages
Maya says when he pitched his CFO on the thought of switching from the VPN to Zscaler’s Zero Belief platform the three advantages he envisioned have been decrease value, higher safety, and a greater consumer expertise.
On the associated fee entrance, he has been in a position to cut back the variety of home equipment within the knowledge middle and cut back assist prices related to the VPN infrastructure.
Safety has been improved as a result of he has moved away from hub-and-spoke VPNs and a standard castle-and-moat safety structure to a cloud-based Zero Belief mannequin. Maya says the character of the enterprise is that Royal Caribbean collects private info on its clients, and the Zero Belief method helps him shield that helpful buyer knowledge.
The worker expertise has improved as a result of staff can now “hearth up Zscaler” and securely hook up with their productiveness purposes in a few clicks.
Past these advantages, Maya says he appreciates the attentiveness and responsiveness of Zscaler personnel. He maintains longstanding strategic relationships with among the largest gamers within the trade: Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM. However he says he has at all times felt like “a guppie in a big pond” when coping with these behemoths.
Zscaler personnel are “at all times obtainable to assist remedy a difficulty,” and that goes all the best way as much as the highest. “I can ship an e mail to the CEO and get a return e mail inside 10 minutes,” Maya says.
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