Jim Paolicelli of Atlantic Constructors talks about Zero Networks

Jim Paolicelli, IT Director at Atlantic Constructors, Inc. (ACI), discusses the positive impact of implementing Zero Networks in their organization.

Mr. Paolicelli highlights how Zero Networks has transformed their approach to cybersecurity, with users expressing satisfaction with the product—a rarity in IT. He emphasizes the ease of implementation and effectiveness of Zero Networks, particularly in whitelisting and microsegmentation, which were previously lacking in their cybersecurity measures.

Paolicelli describes how Zero Networks has streamlined their network security processes, freeing up resources and providing peace of mind through its comprehensive protection against attacks like ransomware.

Additionally, he praises the introduction of Secure Remote Access through Zero Networks, which has significantly improved performance and reliability while simplifying the user experience. Overall, ACI agrees that Zero Networks is a game-changing solution that has greatly enhanced their cybersecurity posture and operational efficiency.

Transcript

Jim Paolicelli, IT Director, Atlantic Constructors: Normally in IT, you only hear complaints. This is probably the first product anytime that I've ever had users talk to me and say they're happy with it.

00:18
My name is Jim Paolicelli, I'm the IT director at Atlantic Constructors. Atlantic Constructors is a little over a thousand people, manufacturing, construction, HVAC company. Whitelisting, microsegmentation are becoming more and more a requirement by cyber insurance companies. We didn't have anything like that before we looked at Zero. A lot of the products were whitelisting-based where the implementation was pretty intense.

00:48

When I saw Zero, I had to see it to believe it because compared to the rest of the products that we were looking at, it looked too easy to be true. But it was as good as they said. We did a POC and immediately the product was up and running in, I don't know, maybe 10 or 15 minutes. It just worked right away, I mean, it was pretty amazing to see all of the things that it was discovering that we didn't even know about. 

01:18

Zero Networks allowed us to dig deep into all of the devices on our network and basically just say, this doesn't need to connect so it's not connecting. If we try to do that without Zero Networks we'd spend a good majority of our time on the machines doing configurations, monitoring. 

01:41

This literally takes a person out of my department and Zero Networks takes that person and moves them to another area, they don't have to worry about that anymore. I go in there just for fun most of the time, just to see what's happening, it really gives me a peace of mind knowing that it's out there doing its thing.

02:05

After we got Zero I decided to run another pen test just to see how things were working and we literally could not get it to penetrate one of the machines that we were testing. We were trying to do a ransomware attack test to basically just testing our EDR, and I actually had to create a rule to disallow Zero from doing its thing so that I could actually get to these machines. So it was pretty amazing, it was a little irritating in a good way because I knew that Zero was doing its thing. 

02:36

One of the new features that we've implemented over the past year was Secure Remote Access through Zero Networks. This replaced several of our legacy VPN products. Since we've migrated over to that it's been nothing but terrific. We've moved all of our users over, we did some speed tests and the performance probably doubled. The reliability went up 100%. The simplicity of it, it's a no-brainer type product. You basically just log in and it's done, so it's a set it and forget it at this point, it was pretty incredible.