The name Royal Caribbean summons pictures of high-end cruise ships, first-class entertainment, fine dining, sandy beaches, awesome sunsets, tall tropical beverages.
“Our mission is to develop magnificent holidays with great experiences and excellent memories for our crew and our visitors,” states John Maya, vice president of operational quality at Miami-based Royal Caribbean Group.Beyond the glitz and glamour, however, Royal Caribbean has the exact same internal systems as any business in the travel/hospitality market– corporate offices, sales, marketing, appointments, call centers, baggage handling, etc.Maya explains his IT facilities as hybrid cloud , with some resources hosted on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, but also some core systems, such as the mission vital appointments application, running on an IBM AS-400 server in an Equinix data center in Virginia.Legacy VPN reaches completion of the road There are
3 brand names under the Royal Caribbean Group umbrella– Royal Caribbean International, Star Cruises and Silversea Cruises– with a total of 85,000 workers, the majority of whom work aboard the ships that take tourists to more than 300 locations, everywhere from Alaska to Australia.But there are also in between 8,000-10,000 employees who operate at repaired areas, including home offices, offices in Europe and Asia, and port operations spread around the world. There are also third-party professionals, and near 1,000 call-center agents who work out of their homes. On the cruise ships, guests and most crew members don’t have access to the business network, however Maya does have to offer secure remote
access for the captain and other essential employees.They were all connected to corporate headquarters through a hub-and-spoke design Cisco AnyConnect VPN. Maya stated the VPN was reaching end-of-life, and he was trying to find an option that would offer better security, cut costs, and a provide a better user experience. Zero Trust Based on discussions with colleagues and his own experiences at previous career stops, Maya entered into discussions with Zscaler, then signed up for the business’s No Trust Exchange, a cloud-native platform that safely connects users to work they require to do their jobs.Maya says he’s been “delighted”with the experience.”The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange allows us to work from anywhere– office, cruise liner, hotel, airplane, Starbucks. It has become so ingrained into our environment that it has become foundational. We do not see how we can operate without it, “he says.For example, Maya said end users used to have the ability to power up and turn
off the VPN at will. He wanted a system where end users were required to go through No Trust-based gain access to controls for all connectivity.”With Zscaler, we can lock down gadget access to the internet and put restrictions on where people can surf. It’s always on,”he says.In the past, Royal Caribbean lent out end-user devices to
specialists all over the world.”We didn’t do the greatest task getting that equipment back, “Maya concedes. With the new system in location, all 3rd parties have to bring their own gadgetsand have their own Workplace 365 licenses. “We put a Zscaler agent on their gadget so they can access the network,”he says. Maya’s IT department deals with their counterparts at professionals
‘companies to make certain that representative is running in the background, imposing Absolutely no Trust guidelines for multi-factor authentication and identity and access management(IAM ). Security service edge With the Zscaler security service edge(SSE )platform, Royal Caribbean applications … Source