Fareportal Protects Customer Data and Reduces Fraudwith Zscaler Threat Prevention

Fareportal began as a traditional travel agency, booking travel and creating tickets on paper. As internet commerce began to explode, Fareportal moved away from paper bookings to an online platform. After the launch, it became evident that security is a critical element of a successful online business.

Security has always been a major concern for Fareportal, which has dealt with personally identifiable information since its inception. However, a digital transformation brings an increased emphasis on security, as well as increased complexity.

“We couldn’t allow our agents to access normal email sites, upload sites, or any kind of non-business-related site while working in the contact center because they have customers’ most confidential information sitting in their systems,” Ahuja said.

However, internet access is a critical tool for Fareportal’s agents. This meant creating unique policies for the various groups in the contact center and throughout the organization.

“We had to have different web policies, tailored for different users in the contact center, different policies for managers, for people who are picking up the calls, for technology folks, and different ones for our leadership,” Ahuja said. “Some policies are based on blocking everything and opening only a few areas, while some policies allow everything and only block a few areas.”

While researching solutions, Ahuja and his team discovered that hardware-based security solutions weren’t designed to solve the types of problems Fareportal was facing. In addition, these systems would strain Ahuja and his team.

“We wanted to put minimum effort into managing the solution from an operational standpoint. So we need a SaaS-based service that could manage and solve this problem for us,” Ahuja said.

In the end, there was only one tool that was able to support the complexity of their internet access as well as meet their operational needs. “The only solution we were able to find to solve our digital transformation needs was Zscaler,” Ahuja said.

With Zscaler, Fareportal was able to reduce the number of security policies from around 700 to around 75 policies. And, Zscaler was able to prevent nearly 400 million policy violations over the course of three months. “That has helped us to improve our network performance and solve any problems immediately, because we now know which policy is related to which user,” Ahuja said.

After implementing Zscaler Internet Access, Fareportal saw its fraud rate drastically drop. In addition, the number of malicious incidents was cut in half.

“Be it phishing or malware or bots getting installed on a machine, or people trying to connect and do something malicious, with all the threat blocking Zscaler is doing for us, the number of threats has reduced significantly.”

Ahuja added that, since the Zscaler platform was performing so well, the team was able to start inspecting SSL-encrypted traffic to provide increased security. In addition, the new restrictions on internet access at contact centers lead to a change in culture.

The team worked closely with Fareportal’s human resources department to clearly communicate the changes to employees. Ultimately, this led to an increase in employee productivity.

The size of the Zscaler cloud, with more than 150 data centers around the globe, allows users a shorter, and faster, route to the internet. This was of great benefit as Fareportal looked to expand their international office presence.

“We have a large customer base outside the USA, including Canada, Mexico, the UK, and the EU region, and that’s where our offices are,” Ahuja said. “When we start planning the opening of an office in a new location and setting up a new employee base, Zscaler is available and speeds up the process of securely bringing the new location online. This helps us with our international growth strategy.”

The size and scalability of the Zscaler cloud also provide Fareportal with the bandwidth and security to handle seasonal spikes in traffic and threats.

“We don’t have to worry when we look ahead at our future internet traffic, because now the internet traffic can grow and Zscaler can handle it. During peak seasons, the threat landscape also grows, and that’s where Zscaler helps us to understand and make sure that we are able to scale up faster,” Ahuja said.

The performance of the Zscaler solution, as well as the support Fareportal has received to get the platform working correctly, has emboldened Fareportal to expand its use of Zscaler, specifically with Zscaler Cloud Data Loss Prevention™ (DLP) and Zscaler Private Access™ (ZPA™).

“Zscaler has a dedicated customer success team that helped us get where we need to be successful,” Ahuja said.