UC Santa Barbara Accelerates Compliance with Zero Trust Segmentation Across 400+ Campus Locations

The UC system president issued a mandate requiring segmentation of university and visitor business and vulnerability management across university-owned devices.

Legacy approaches that tied segmentation to location and historical ownership could not scale to UCSB’s 400+ locations and 125,000 devices—many of them BYOD and not centrally managed.

VPN-based remote access and a patchwork of network stacks and philosophies increased complexity and limited UCSB’s ability to securely support BYOD.

Centralized core network operations and defined a new target-state architecture that replaces VPN and enables policy-based security at scale.

Implemented agentless device segmentation to discover devices and control east-west traffic.

Adopted a zero trust approach to application connectivity, meaning users can reach private apps and servers without extending UCSB’s network to unmanaged devices.

Reduces complexity and avoids costs by minimizing the need to build and maintain thousands of traditional network segments and intermediary controls.

Improves security posture by shrinking the attack surface and limiting lateral movement between university business systems, visitors, and BYOD.

Accelerates progress toward UC system mandates by enabling consistent, policy-based segmentation and secure access across a highly distributed campus.