Case Study: Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust achieves unified Zero Trust security, prevents thousands of cyberattacks and saves £300K with Zscaler

Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust Earns Top Cyber Innovator Award for its Zscaler Zero Trust Architecture

Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, which provides mental health and learning disability services across Greater Manchester, was hampered by an aging perimeter security architecture—VPNs and firewalls—that struggled to support hybrid working, put patient data at greater risk, and left the trust close to non‑compliance with NHS security requirements.

In partnership with Virgin Media Business, Pennine Care replaced legacy appliances with Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange (ZIA, ZPA, ZDX), tightly integrated with Microsoft, to secure ~4,000–4,500 users and remove all VPN infrastructure. The cloud‑native solution improved visibility and UX, prevented thousands of attacks (about 6,000 per month), blocked 24,000 threats, processed 884 million transactions, cut help‑desk requests by 30%, saved more than £300K a year (plus ~£70K in hardware), and earned national recognition for cyber innovation.

Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust

Mike Culshaw

Chief Technology Officer