BorgWarner Embraces Zero Trust + AI, Experiences 75% Faster Time-to-Value for M&As and Divestitures

Operating at the speed of innovation requires large-scale digital modernization

Founded in 1928, BorgWarner evolved from manufacturing traditional internal combustion engine components to producing electric vehicle propulsion technologies. Today, the company’s mission is to deliver mobility solutions for a clean and energy-efficient world—from electric motors to charging stations. 

In keeping with the company’s innovation culture, Mark Williams, IT Director, Global Network Engineering, thinks like an entrepreneur and takes pride in “carefully planning and strategizing for the future.” 

To support BorgWarner’s business growth, Williams set in motion an ambitious and methodical plan to upgrade its primarily on-premises castle-and-moat security architecture to cloud native zero trust. His security modernization blueprint aimed to:

• Accelerate M&A integration to expedite product innovation
• Eliminate multiple data centers while securing ongoing migration to the Microsoft Azure cloud
• Reduce sprawling technical debt, including legacy VPNs and EOL firewalls 
• Provide the hybrid workforce with secure connectivity to apps and resources and a seamless user experience
• Improve overall cybersecurity and control usage of GenAI apps to protect against data loss

Taking these goals into account, Williams saw how Zscaler’s unified zero trust platform could provide a future-proof foundation for the company’s transformation and growth trajectory. 

“When we first considered the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform, it wasn't just about fixing a few problems. We had a bigger vision in mind: to continue optimizing our security architecture over time. We quickly saw that Zscaler has the capacity to enable that,” said Williams. 

In just six months, Williams and his team of eight brought their vision to fruition. They leveraged Zscaler to complete a divestiture and acquisition in days instead of months, secure the hybrid/remote workforce across all global locations; substantially decrease technical debt by eliminating legacy VPNs, multiple firewalls, and MLPS; and enable safer use of GenAI apps. 

AI-Powered App Segmentation expedites secure access for users and contractors during divestitures and M&As

Williams and team kickstarted BorgWarner’s modernization journey by deploying Zscaler Private Access (ZPA). According to Williams, ZPA and its AI-Powered App Segmentation streamlined and accelerated the divestiture of Delphi Technologies and the acquisition of Eldor Corporation.

The Delphi spin-off led to the creation of PHINIA, a standalone publicly traded entity. As a result of this divestiture resulted in about 2,500, or 50%, of Delphi’s contractors stayed with BorgWarner. The rest joined PHINIA. Contractors at both companies were using a common VPN solution to access resources and private applications hosted in BorgWarner's environment during the transition. BorgWarner had two firewalls at every global location for the sole purpose of managing dynamic access policies for each contractor that connected to its network.

To quickly and logically separate the two environments, Williams enrolled BorgWarner’s contractors in ZPA, giving them secure direct access to authorized private apps without connecting them to the network. The solution allowed Williams to organize BorgWarner applications into discrete groups and provide access based on the principle of least privilege. After successfully completing the Delphi divestiture, Williams extended ZPA to 23,000 employees across more than 80 global sites, leveraging the same AI-powered App Segmentation for over 300 private apps. 

Like contractors, BorgWarner’s employees have secure, direct-to-app connectivity. Users never access the network, thereby stopping lateral threat movement. AI-Powered App Segmentation gives Williams and his team granular visibility into which users or user groups have access to which apps. Analyzing user access patterns and requirements, the AI model generates recommendations for app segmentation and provides visualizations of quantifiable internal attack surface reduction for each recommendation. 

BorgWarner has also has five to six major acquisitions every few years, among them electronic auto parts manufacturer Eldor Corporation, which had 3,000 employees at 14 global locations. Before Zscaler, it would typically take months to complete an M&A integration and ensure secure sharing of sensitive data. 

“Zscaler enabled integration with Eldor 75% faster. In just days, BorgWarner engineers were collaborating with teams from Eldor." For BorgWarner, accelerating the M&A process is critical to expanding its product portfolio. “The faster we onboard these companies, the more quickly we can develop and roll out products,” noted Williams.

Creating a zero trust café-like experience for everyone, everywhere, while increasing security resilience

For Williams, a big part of BorgWarner’s zero trust journey was realizing his vision of delivering a seamless, consistent, and secure café-like experience for users at branches everywhere. Zscaler made it possible for him to accomplish this and eliminate significant technical debt, including vulnerable and poorly performing VPNs, more than 90 firewalls, and hub-and-spoke MPLS networking.

In addition to the ZPA implementation, Williams initiated the rollout of Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA), which provides users with secure, direct connectivity to the internet and SaaS apps. He also replaced bandwidth-intensive and costly MPLS backhauling at branches with the Zscaler and Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN integration.

Zscaler strengthens BorgWarner’s security posture in this new café model with ZIA’s built-in TLS/SSL inspection and its native AI-powered cyberthreat protection, including Zscaler Sandbox, which prevents zero-day attacks through quarantine and analysis of suspicious files. Zero Trust Cloud Firewall capabilities in ZIA provide the network and security teams with the ability to define granular block/allow rules for outbound traffic across any specified destinations, ports, and protocols. 

The Zscaler integration with CrowdStrike adds an extra layer of protection by assessing device risk and enforcing access control policy based on CrowdStrike Falcon’s Zero Trust Assessment (ZTA) health scores. Zscaler also receives real-time security incident context data from CrowdStrike to dynamically adapt and adjust zero trust access policies for devices. 

The Zscaler-Microsoft Entra ID integration is another important enabler of hybrid work at BorgWarner. Using their Entra ID credentials, users can automatically access Zscaler services, streamlining the login process and enhancing the user experience. Administrators control and manage identify and access through the Microsoft Azure portal.

To help BorgWarner’s technology leaders make actionable decisions faster—no matter where they are—Williams recently deployed the Zscaler Executive Insights App on their mobile phones. The app gives executives-on-the-go instant views into the company’s risk score compared to industry peers, maps out how Zscaler protects against specific threats, and categorizes high-profile threats based on relevance and risk levels. 

“If we didn't have Zscaler, we wouldn’t have the flexibility, agility, and protection to support hybrid work. Life has become easier for the network and security teams, as well. We no longer worry about employees or contractors exposing our network to potential threats,” said Williams. 

Securing CoPilot and public GenAI usage

BorgWarner is leveraging Zscaler to unlock safer usage of creativity- and productivity-enhancing GenAI tools like Microsoft CoPilot and open source DeepSeek. Zscaler provides greater visibility into and control over AI usage. It detects shadow IT by identifying who is using what AI apps; stops data loss by blocking certain user interactions; and examines input prompts to understand how GenAI is being used. When executives raise concerns about the risks of a specific AI app, Williams can easily assess the potential impact and block the app across all 56 data centers in seconds if necessary.

Integration with Microsoft enables Zscaler to put up guardrails for CoPilot including preventing oversharing vital data, correcting dangerous misconfigurations that can expose data to risk, applying sensitivity labels to specified data, and more. Zscaler delivers daily reports on employee CoPilot usage that Williams and his team can interpret in a variety of ways. For example, they can gain usage insights for each user, allowing his team to see who the “top talkers” are and what large language models (LLMs) each one of their locations are running. 

“As an innovation-driven company, we want to empower our employees to use AI so that they can be more productive, generate creative ideas, and shape product development. At the same time, in order to better manage risk, we want to teach them about best practices,” said Williams. “Zscaler gives us the ability to rapidly stand up a caution page for users. The impact of that has been extremely beneficial: it raises security awareness while allowing users to make the most of GenAI.”

Cyber resilience increases, costs decrease

Since deploying Zscaler, Williams has observed that transmission of viruses and malware has been significantly reduced, lessening the time and effort spent on incident response. Over a three-month period, Zscaler prevented 66.3 million policy violations and blocked 1.5 million security threats, 366,584 of which were threats buried in encrypted traffic.

“We're 100% relying on Zscaler because it’s allowing us to do things we weren’t able to do in the past. TLS/SSL inspection, for example, is a brand new capability for us. It delivers value back to the business because now we're able to see inside our traffic and can proactively reduce the volume of security incidents,” explained Williams. 

BorgWarner’s Zscaler deployment has resulted in millions of dollars of hard cost savings through reduction of technical debt, elimination of point solutions, and lower bandwidth consumption. “We're leveraging our investment with Zscaler by consolidating our tools and no longer having to acquire separate solutions for different functions,” he explained. 

From an operational standpoint, the cloud native Zscaler platform yields significant cost efficiencies as well. Elimination of physical appliances has eased the management and maintenance burden. 

Optimizing zero trust to support a sustainable future

With a clear goal of eliminating on-premises data centers in the near future, Williams and his team are ready to take the company’s zero trust journey to the next level. 

They recently tested the standard version of Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) and were impressed at how rapidly it pinpointed common ISP and access point performance issues to enable faster resolution. At a corporate town hall, Williams presented these early wins to gain buy-in for deploying the full version of ZDX.

“ZDX Advanced will help me lighten the load on my service desk. By decreasing time-to-resolution with its AI-driven insights, we will improve uptime for our users, which means we can give them a better experience and boost their productivity. For BorgWarner, this translates to operational cost savings and ties into our business goal of accelerating innovation,” noted Williams.

Also on BorgWarner’s zero trust roadmap is Zscaler China Premium Plus, which will reduce complexity and eliminate performance issues for users in China. It will give these employees the same secure experience other BorgWarner users enjoy while enabling Williams to enforce policies like prohibiting use of DeepSeek. 

Looking ahead, he envisions reducing dependency on traditional SD-WAN with Zscaler Zero Trust SD-WAN  across all locations, including warehouses and manufacturing facilities. The Zero Trust SD-WAN appliance will enable zero trust security across all users, devices, servers, IoT, and OT in all branch locations by providing direct branch-to-internet, branch-to-app connectivity and privileged remote access.

Williams recognizes all the ways in which Zscaler harmonizes with BorgWarner’s business strategy. “Zscaler’s innovations are helping to support our own innovation goals. We’re leveraging the Zscaler platform to combat AI-enabled threats, use GenAI tools confidently and securely, and better protect our environment with AI-Powered Application Segmentation,” Williams said. “I can't emphasize enough that the biggest benefit Zscaler has provided to BorgWarner is reducing time-to-collaborate, which translates to faster time-to-market for new products,” remarked Williams.