Zscaler has announced that Maxeon Solar Technologies, a global specialist in solar cell and panel manufacturing with sales operations in more than 100 countries, is leveraging the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange cloud security platform to deliver secure access for its workforce and to accelerate its digital transformation initiatives.  

Stemming from its divestiture from SunPower Corporation, a U.S.-based distributed generation storage and energy services provider, Maxeon required a future-ready integrated security services edge (SSE) platform to provide secure, direct access to critical business applications for its 5,000 global employees and seamlessly add new security services as their organisation scaled.  

Stephen Gani, Chief Information Security Officer at Maxeon, says, "First and foremost, we had to make sure Maxeon maintained business continuity while ensuring our employees, applications and data remained secure. While we evaluated several big-name vendors, Zscaler came out as a clear winner because of its proven capabilities and position as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for 11 consecutive years.

"The divestiture was in progress during the pandemic, so our immediate concern was protecting our sensitive data and employees who were working from a variety of remote locations from the growing set of sophisticated threats ransomware, zero-day malware, and other advanced attacks."

As its initial steps in its zero trust and SSE journey, Maxeon deployed Zscaler Internet Access solution for fast direct-to-cloud web access, inline traffic inspection, and security that moves with users, regardless of where they work. The team also added Zscaler Cloud Data Loss Prevention solution into its security stack to gain visibility into data across all internet and encrypted SSL traffic and to enable data discovery across users, applications, content types, and file types.  

To help ensure an optimal user experience regardless of location, Maxeon also implemented Zscaler Digital Experience solution, an integrated service in the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, across its global offices.

With Zscaler Digital Experience, Maxeon's IT team was able to quickly diagnose and remediate quality of service issues between users and applications at speed to maintain a seamless user experience and ensure business continuity, the company states.

With the portfolio of solutions on hand, Maxeon enabled safe and reliable access to the web and SaaS apps post-divestiture, eliminating the need for a high-maintenance data center and associated costs, as well as improving and securing the user experience for its global workforce of 5,000.

Scott Robertson, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan at Zscaler, comments, "Balancing cybersecurity, employee experience and cost efficiencies remains a challenge for most organisations. With a growing list of products and solutions available in the market, it can be a daunting task for IT teams to decipher what they truly need and implement the right solutions to achieve this balancing act.

"It becomes pertinent for organisations to choose a partner that can help them navigate and implement a robust and seamless security architecture. We are especially delighted to support a company like Maxeon in achieving its workforce moderniation and security transformation goals. We look forward to our continued partnership with the team as they continue to optimise their security infrastructure."