Zscaler > Case Studies > Accelerated Cloud Migration and Remote Work Rollout: A Case Study of National Oilwell Varco

Accelerated Cloud Migration and Remote Work Rollout: A Case Study of National Oilwell Varco

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

Applicable Industries

National Security & Defense
Telecommunications

Use Cases

Remote Control
Tamper Detection

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
Testing & Certification

About The Customer

National Oilwell Varco (NOV) is a globally-distributed company with operations in over 600 locations. It is a Fortune 500 company that supplies technical equipment and services to the global oil-and-gas industry. The company has a large computing workforce of 25,000 employees, 70% of whom are mobile with laptops. NOV's fortunes are tied to fluctuating global commodities markets, and the company's IT team is tasked with managing these shifts while maintaining high levels of service and security. The company's CIO, Alex Philips, is committed to the company's mission of powering the industry that powers the world.

The Challenge

National Oilwell Varco (NOV), a Fortune 500 company supplying technical equipment and services to the global oil-and-gas industry, faced a significant challenge when the entire company had to move to remote access. With operations in over 600 locations and a large computing workforce of 25,000 employees, 70% of whom are mobile with laptops, the shift was not straightforward. The company's fortunes are tied to fluctuating global commodities markets, and after oil prices plummeted in the mid-2010s, the IT team was tasked with doing more with less. They needed to reduce the burden of legacy technical debt, lower historically high costs, add more capabilities, and improve security for their worldwide organization. The company began its transformation in 2016 with a shift to the cloud, away from what CIO Alex Philips describes as 'security appliance hell.'

The Solution

NOV invested in Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) and introduced secure local internet breakouts for its employees. The move was pragmatic: ZIA provided an optimal secure access service edge (SASE) model that optimized SaaS access, and in particular, helped accelerate its Microsoft 365 rollout. NOV replaced legacy hardware-based security appliances, saving the company money, delivering better security, and improving user experience. Philips describes this transformation as a 'smart cloud usage approach': moving NOV to the cloud where and when it made sense and on NOV’s own terms. In 2018, Philips and his IT stakeholders began rolling out Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) to secure remote access to internal applications. ZIA and ZPA brought a new level of security to NOV connectivity, enabling protected remote access (for both employees and third-party contractors) and comprehensive inspection of incoming and outgoing SSL/TLS-encrypted data.

Operational Impact

The rapid transition to a remote-access workforce went smoothly despite a few initial connection hiccups. The company was able to support a drastically different new reality: 27,500 employees around the world all needing remote access to work from anywhere. The investment in ZPA set the stage for the company’s shift to remote access, and with Zscaler’s assurance that its globally-distributed SASE cloud could accommodate NOV’s secure-remote-access traffic volume, the company was able to respond effectively to the crisis. The remote-access effort has fostered NOV’s longer-term operational agility.

Quantitative Benefit

NOV's legacy on-prem remote-access solution was designed to handle up to 2000 users at any one time, but moving to ZPA opened up a world of future capacity.
NOV saw the number of ZPA concurrent user connections increase 4.5X over a sixteen-day period.
Operational performance spikes were observed with more than 9,000 NOV employees connecting to corporate applications and data resources simultaneously.