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National Oilwell Varco (NOV) is undergoing a sweeping cybersecurity transformation under CIO Alex Philips, embracing a Zero Trust architecture, strengthening identity defenses and infusing AI into security operations. While the journey is not complete, the results, by all accounts, are dramatic – a 35-fold drop in security events, the elimination of malware-related PC reimaging and millions saved by scrapping legacy “appliance hell” hardware.
VentureBeat recently sat down (virtually) for this in-depth interview where Philips details how NOV achieved these outcomes with Zscaler’s Zero Trust platform, aggressive identity protections and a generative AI “co-worker” for its security team.
He also shares how he keeps NOV’s board engaged on cyber risk amid a global threat landscape where 79% of attacks to gain initial access are malware-free, and adversaries can move from breach to break out in as little as 51 seconds.
Below are excerpts of Philips’ recent interview with VentureBeat:
VentureBeat: Alex, NOV went “all in” on Zero Trust a number of years ago – what were the standout gains?
Alex Philips: When we started, we were a traditional castle-and-moat model that wasn’t keeping up. We didn’t know what Zero Trust was, we just knew that we needed identity and conditional access at the core of everything. Our journey began by adopting an identity-driven architecture on Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange and it changed everything. Our visibility and protection coverage dramatically increased while simultaneously experiencing a 35x reduction in the number of security incidents. Before, our team was chasing thousands of malware incidents; now, it’s a tiny fraction of that. We also went from reimaging about 100 malware-infected machines each month to virtually zero now. That’s saved a considerable amount of time and money. And since the solution is cloud-based, Appliance hell is gone, as I like to say.
The zero trust approach now gives 27,500 NOV users and third parties policy-based access to thousands of internal applications, all without exposing those apps directly to the internet.
We were then able to take an interim step and re-architect our network to take advantage of internet-based connectivity vs. legacy expensive MPLS. “On average, we increased speed by 10–20x, reduced latency to critical SaaS apps, and slashed cost by over 4x… Annualized savings [from network changes] have already achieved over $6.5M,” Philips has noted of the project.
VB: How did shifting to zero tru …