Kainos Shares Five Essential Tips for Your Zscaler Deployment at Scale

Kainos is in the business of digital transformation. As a digital advisory firm to the financial services, healthcare, government, education, and insurance industries, we’re always exploring emerging technologies and looking for ways to innovate.

Over the past several years, we’ve been on a rapid global expansion track. We started out operating mainly from Northern Ireland and the UK, but as we added distributed locations across Europe, North America, and beyond, we had to rethink our traditional on-premises infrastructure. We knew the cost of managing and maintaining a hub-and-spoke network would become prohibitive as our global footprint grew, and it quickly became apparent that our legacy VPN could not scale to meet our remote users’ needs.

Read the 2026 Zscaler ThreatLabz VPN Risk Report

The biggest challenge we faced as a technology services provider was giving our development teams a flexible, secure environment while also meeting an ever-widening range of customer security requirements.

Zero trust had been on our radar for some time, and the shift to remote working in 2020 was the catalyst that accelerated our cloud-first strategy. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange enabled us to embrace a zero trust architecture. Several years on, that architecture is now firmly embedded in how we operate. It has matured from a deployment project into business-as-usual, woven into how our teams work every day. We’ve recently renewed our partnership with Zscaler for the next three years and beyond. With AI now reshaping both how we build software and how adversaries attack it, a zero trust foundation matters more than ever.

Looking back at our deployment, I’d like to share what I think we did well that led to successful outcomes; lessons that still hold true today.

1. Ensure leadership support and buy-in from the beginning

Rolling out a platform like Zscaler represents a substantial change in how you enable remote work and accommodate expansion. It’s a major step forward in security posture, day and night compared with a traditional on-premises security stack.

When you initiate a change this big, challenges are inevitable. You won’t know every single use case for every person in your business at the outset; it’s a process you have to work through. Getting leadership to understand the rationale in advance was instrumental in helping us move forward in a measured way.

I leveraged our internal governance structures to report back to leadership on how the rollout was progressing. We explained what incident tickets were about and showed how we were addressing them, keeping everyone aligned — internal support teams, technical staff, and leadership alike.

2. Have a clear rollout plan

Engage users early when you roll out zero trust across the company. Know your users, how they work, and how they use their devices every day. I’d recommend recruiting a group to take part in early concept testing. Learn their real-world use cases, then work through any issues or concerns as you validate each one.

3. Open clear lines of communication

Keep the lines of communication between your test groups and the deployment team as direct and open as possible. Throughout this project, when someone raised a request, we responded quickly so we could work through it together and keep momentum going. That tight feedback loop helped us meet user requirements faster and more efficiently.

4. Host group sessions

Rather than letting issues trickle in one at a time through the ticketing system, we hosted group sessions with our test groups. We encouraged people to bring any Zscaler questions to these meetings and answered them on the same call. That let us make big strides with multiple groups who had very different needs and requirements.

5. Build policies where needed

Early in the deployment, a number of our developers were unfamiliar with adding custom certificates for SSL inspection to the applications that needed to trust them. So we created a step-by-step guide for building a development setup with the correct certificates inside an application. We repeated that process across the development teams and built up a series of internal knowledge-base articles describing exactly how developers could set up their machines to work with Zscaler.

If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it the same way. Deploying zero trust can be a lengthy and sometimes complex process, but by following these tips and choosing a platform like Zscaler’s, you can make it go as smoothly as possible.

It’s worth it in the end. Life is easier for everyone. We’ve accelerated our cloud-first strategy, and we fully support our remote and hybrid workforce with seamless, secure access to the private applications and development tools they need, wherever they’re based. We’ve strengthened our security posture, achieved substantial improvement in detection capabilities against advanced threats and data loss, and we can readily meet our customers’ unique security and data residency requirements. We’ve come a long way.

Eager to learn how the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange supports innovation at Kainos? Read the case study.