When a company’s product involves consumable dairy beverages, including milk and infant nutrition, safety is top of mind for everyone in the organization. That includes the information-technology staff at Royal FrieslandCampina N.V., a Dutch company that distributes dairy products around the world.

“The challenge that we’re having is, we have to make sure that everything is safe. That the product is safe, but also the data,” said Erik Klein (pictured), infrastructure architect at FrieslandCampina. “We’re not only looking at transferring data safely from the cloud into our offices and production environments, we also protect our production environments from everything that’s going bad on the internet.”

Klein spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in Palo Alto, California. They discussed how Zscaler’s technology helps protect company systems against a powerful ransomware attack and the importance of ensuring that operational technology is integrated and secure. (* Disclosure below.)

Defense against virus

With data protection playing such a vital role, FrieslandCampina turned to Zscaler for help when it moved certain applications, such as Microsoft Office 365, to the cloud. The company also realized a distinct advantage when a devastating ransomware computer attack called WannaCry rocketed through systems around the globe in 2017.

“The reason we identified WannaCry is that someone noticed that one server never talked to a particular device,” Klein recalled. “If you know what is good, everything that is not defined as being good can be defined as bad. Our biggest advantage was the call back to the command and control server was already blocked by Zscaler, so it didn’t hurt us that much.”

The company made a complete redesign of its network architecture in its move to the cloud, according to Klein. In doing so, FrieslandCampina also addressed security where operational technology was involved.

“Now we have an architecture where we can integrate all different flavors of OT,” Klein said. “There’s no need for OT to have their own internet connections for maintenance or support. It’s all integrated and secure.”

Watch the complete video interview below. (* Disclosure: Zscaler Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Zscaler nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image by Ryan Song on Unsplash