Case Study: National Oilwell Varco saves millions and cuts cyber events 35x with Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange

NOV Goes All In on Zero Trust and Zscaler Saving Millions While Advancing Security

NOV, a Houston-based energy technology leader with 32,000+ employees across 62 countries, faced rising costs and a brittle “castle-and-moat” security model that couldn’t support a globally distributed, mobile workforce. Pressured by market conditions to reduce legacy technical debt and improve agility, the company needed an identity-driven zero trust architecture to enable secure work-from-anywhere access on almost any device without disrupting operations.

NOV adopted a “cloud‑smart” approach, moving to Microsoft 365 and the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange (including ZIA, ZPA, Zero Trust Browser and ZDX) with integrations to Okta and SentinelOne. The result: 35x fewer security events, direct policy‑based access to 7,500+ apps, effectively zero monthly machine reimaging from malware, 10–20x faster access to SaaS apps, elimination of appliance hardware, and millions in savings (including over $4.5M annualized from network circuit changes), establishing a simplified, identity‑driven zero trust foundation.

National Oilwell Varco

John McLeod

CISO