Case Study: AutoNation achieves a secure, centralized move to the cloud with Zscaler

Zscaler™ secures AutoNation’s drive to the cloud

AutoNation, America’s largest auto retailer with more than 360 retail and corporate locations and 26,000 employees, needed a way to secure Internet-connected systems and IoT devices across a widely distributed footprint with limited IT staff. The company faced heavy Internet-bound traffic, differing connectivity requirements from car manufacturers, and found routing all traffic through a central data center or deploying appliance stacks to each site to be too costly and complex.

AutoNation adopted Zscaler’s cloud security (including Office 365 optimization, Cloud Sandbox, and a next‑gen cloud firewall), forwarding Internet traffic via GRE tunnels to a centrally managed service. The rollout took two to three months for initial capabilities and under a year for full deployment; it eliminated per-site hardware and capex, improved visibility (blocking command‑and‑control and P2P traffic and recovering infected endpoints), cut about 500 GB/month of P2P bandwidth, and enabled faster, more secure Office 365 and cloud migrations.

AutoNation

Jeff Johnson

Information Security Operations Director