Contained Lateral Movement Across 4,500+ Locations

Challenge

With over 4,500 franchise locations and a quickly growing hybrid workforce, Great Clips faced an ever-expanding attack surface that was increasingly difficult to protect across the distributed systems supporting daily salon operations, appointments, and business applications. Traditional segmentation and internal firewall rules couldn’t keep pace with the volume of endpoints and users, leaving security gaps across servers, laptops, and remote access paths.

Vulnerability scans kept flagging the same issues: portals and applications that couldn’t be restricted, excessive internal access that couldn’t be minimized, and a VPN portal that was always exposed to attackers in an environment spread across thousands of geographically distributed locations.

Solution

Every year we go through these vulnerability scans and they ask, ‘Can you restrict access to this portal? Can you restrict access to this application?’ And the answer was no. Now, the answer is yes.

Tim Bartram, IT Operations Manager, Great Clips

Great Clips turned to Zero Networks to automate microsegmentation at scale and eliminate the lateral-movement paths traditional firewalls simply couldn’t control across thousands of endpoints and locations. Zero Networks’ automated policy engine analyzed real traffic to build and enforce least-privilege rules across servers, laptops, and remote connections. Ports remained closed unless explicitly needed, and network-layer MFA ensured privileged paths could only be accessed when approved in real time. With the core network locked down, Zero Networks enabled Great Clips to secure remote access without adding complexity for a widely distributed franchise environment.

Result

Before Zero Networks we had gaps, we had openings, we had places that were risk, and after Zero Networks we were able to lock down endpoints both on the server and on the laptops. Our attack surface has decreased… incredibly.

Tim Bartram, IT Operations Manager, Great Clips

With Zero, Great Clips achieved immediate and measurable security gains. The team fully locked down servers and endpoints across thousands of locations, cutting their attack surface “incredibly” and eliminating the long-standing gaps called out in vulnerability scans. Access that was previously impossible to restrict became tightly controlled through automated least-privilege policies and on-demand MFA.

Their VPN portal disappeared from the internet entirely, removing a high-visibility target for scanners and attackers. What once required complex internal firewalling is now enforced automatically – giving Great Clips a stronger security posture, cleaner audits, and confidence in the resilience of their complex network supporting millions of customer interactions each year.