International SOS Secures Internet Browsing with Zero Trust for Faster Delivery of Life-Saving Services

For more than 40 years, International SOS has been the global leader in security, health, and travel risk management, supporting over 9,000 organizations—including the majority of the Fortune Global 500, as well as mid-size enterprises, governments, educational institutions, and NGOs —through a workforce of 13,000 employees operating across 90+ countries. The company’s mission is to lead international health and security risk management, safeguarding people against health and security threats worldwide. This includes delivering emergency and non-emergency medical support, providing travel assistance, coordinating transportation and evacuations, resolving issues such as lost documentation, and enabling travelers to navigate unfamiliar or high-risk environments with confidence.

Delivering on that mission requires ensuring that every employee can securely leverage internet-based technologies and seamlessly access internal business apps from airports, hotels, client sites, and offices worldwide. Over time, it became clear that the organization’s legacy security stack and remote-access architecture were no longer keeping pace with the needs of a highly mobile, globally dispersed workforce. The on-premises internet protection model—anchored by costly deployment of web content filters, traditional VPNs, and multiple firewall layers—expanded technology debt and risk profile, degraded the user experience, and demanded continuous maintenance and oversight.

To strengthen its security posture, streamline operations, and shrink its network footprint, International SOS initiated a cloud-enabled secure internet access, and zero trust modernization program designed to support its cloud-first evolution and mission-critical service delivery.

“We selected the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform because it was the only solution capable of meeting our core objectives: securing internet and intranet access, elevating the user experience, protecting our data, reducing our attack surface, and streamlining our infrastructure footprint,” said Manoj Tewari, General Manager, Information Security and Compliance. “As we advance our journey toward becoming a secure, cloud-first organization and uphold our mandate to keep International SOS secure, certified, and compliant with client expectations, Zscaler clearly stands out as our strategic cybersecurity technology partner, fully aligned to support our long-term vision.”

International SOS launched its zero trust journey with the deployment of Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA). The cloud-native secure web gateway equips its mobile workforce with safe, high-performance, direct access to the internet and SaaS apps.

By routing all web traffic through the Zero Trust Exchange platform, ZIA enforces consistent security policies, regardless of where employees work—at home, in regional offices, at client sites, or while traveling. It blocks malware, ransomware, viruses, and phishing attempts from reaching both managed and unmanaged (BYOD) devices, while delivering the seamless, secure user experience the organization requires to support its cloud-first operations and mission-critical service delivery.

“We remain firmly committed to delivering a secure, seamless, and high-performance user experience for our employees—regardless of where they operate—and Zscaler has been instrumental in enabling that,” said Tewari. “This capability empowers our teams to respond more rapidly while operating with full confidence that their computing environment is protected and compliant.”

Before Zscaler, International SOS relied on distinct regionally located VPN environments—each demanding continuous patching, monitoring, and administrative oversight. As remote work accelerated, the limitations of these legacy VPN architectures became increasingly pronounced: degraded performance from latency and congestion, frequent downtime that eroded productivity, elevated operational burdens, and heightened security exposure driven by an expanded attack surface and risk of lateral threat movement.

To address these challenges, International SOS transitioned from its legacy VPN environment to Zscaler Private Access (ZPA). ZPA delivers direct, secure, policy-driven access to only the internal apps a user is authorized to use—without ever exposing the broader network. High-sensitivity systems, such as electronic medical records and call-recording platforms, are now completely hidden from the internet, significantly reducing the attack surface and strengthening protection against compromise.

In addition, the security team can apply granular, posture-based controls that validate the security state of each device before access is granted, ensuring that only compliant, trusted endpoints can connect to mission-critical apps.

“Zscaler Private Access enables a truly frictionless user experience with zero trust access to our business-critical private apps,” said Tewari. “Employees no longer need to juggle multiple VPN connections, passwords, or repeated multi-factor authentications. And our technology team is freed from the ongoing burden of patching and monitoring legacy solutions—Zscaler handles that for us. ZPA has allowed us to streamline our infrastructure footprint while delivering a faster, more secure remote-access experience for our global workforce.”

International SOS plans to continue expanding its zero trust architecture by integrating additional Zscaler capabilities. Tewari is currently evaluating Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) to enhance visibility and streamline troubleshooting across the organization’s globally distributed workforce. ZDX offers end-to-end insights into app performance, Wi-Fi health, device behavior, and network paths, enabling support teams to diagnose and resolve user experience issues with significantly greater speed and precision.

In parallel, he is assessing Zscaler AI Guard to strengthen governance and security around emerging AI usage within the enterprise. As the intelligence layer of the Zero Trust Exchange, Zscaler AI Guard delivers automated analysis, real-time threat detection, and performance optimization—empowering security teams with data-driven insights that reduce risk and accelerate operational decision-making.

“By extending our deployment with advanced monitoring, analytics, and AI-driven capabilities, we are future-proofing our security architecture and ensuring it continues to safeguard our employees and customers in an increasingly complex digital landscape,” Tewari noted.