Case Study: New York City Department of Education achieves scalable Zero Trust protection for 1M+ users and 2M+ devices with Zscaler

New York City Department of Education Migrates from VPN to Zero Trust

The New York City Department of Education — the largest U.S. school system serving 1M+ students and supporting 2M+ devices — faced a legacy security stack that couldn’t scale for remote learning: traditional VPNs and firewalls were ineffective against advanced threats and gave poor endpoint visibility across a highly distributed environment. The pandemic amplified the need for fast, consistent, and CIPA-compliant access to learning applications while reducing risk and administrative overhead.

NYC DOE deployed the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange (ZIA, ZPA, ZDX), replacing VPNs, inspecting 100% of TLS/SSL traffic, and integrating endpoint telemetry with CrowdStrike. In about 90 days they installed agents on hundreds of thousands of devices, improved visibility and performance, prioritized instructional apps, and saw measurable security gains — including a 15% drop in attacks, 40% more threats blocked, and hundreds of thousands of threats detected and blocked in short windows.

New York City Department of Education

Demond Waters

Chief Information Security Officer