Ten years after beginning its transition to a Zero Trust architecture, Alstom announces the expansion of its partnership with Zscaler. The move gives the rail mobility group an opportunity to reflect on a foundational technology program and to lay out its upcoming milestones.
From a Legacy Infrastructure to a Distributed Model
At the outset, the assessment is typical for a company of this size: a perimeter security stack based on VPNs, firewalls, and VDI environments, difficult to evolve at the pace of international operations.
“The transformation of our security began with a clear objective: to give all our employees, wherever they are, secure access to corporate applications,” summarizes Yann Barera, Global Head of Network at Alstom.
The complexity only intensified amid mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures that have punctuated the group’s recent years, making the management of a centralized infrastructure even harder to maintain. The move to a ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access) architecture enabled Alstom to progressively replace these legacy access mechanisms and standardize connections to business applications, regardless of where employees work.
Needs Expanding: Industrial Sites, Field Operations, and AI
Beyond safeguarding workstations, Alstom is now extending its use to other domains. The offices and factories are the subject of a dedicated deployment to connect and secure IoT and OT devices under the group’s security policies.
In the field, the growth of maintenance activities imposes new constraints. Technicians working in environments without reliable Wi‑Fi must be able to access information systems via the mobile network. To this end, Alstom has deployed a secure cellular connectivity solution (Z-SIM).
The rise of enterprise AI tools opens a new front. “With the increasing power of AI, we needed additional features to govern the new usages,” says Yann Barera. Alstom has thus adopted a data leakage prevention module specifically oriented toward GenAI use, with the aim of maintaining visibility over data flows and protecting intellectual property.
Real-Time Network Experience Monitoring
To shorten resolution times during network incidents, Alstom’s IT teams rely on a monitoring tool that aggregates real-time indicators of the network and endpoints’ status. “We also rely on monitoring capabilities to continually improve the quality of our network,” says Barera.
All of these deployments reflect a gradual but coherent evolution: starting with a secure access challenge for employees, then extending the model to sites, to industrial equipment, and now to AI usage. All of this without rebuilding the infrastructure each time.
