Higher education networks were built for a different era, one where firewalls defined trust boundaries and VPNs extended campus access to remote users. With 125,000 devices across 400+ locations, UC Santa Barbara recognized that legacy architectures couldn't scale securely. The answer wasn't more appliances. It was a different model entirely.
In this fireside chat, Zscaler's Adam Ford sits down with UCSB CTO Shea Lovan to trace their Zero Trust journey, from deploying Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) for secure application connectivity to extending Zero Trust Branch across a sprawling research campus. The session opens with a 10-minute overview of Zero Trust Branch architecture before moving into an interactive discussion covering how UCSB replaced legacy VPN with ZPA to deliver faster, policy-based access without placing users on the network; how it secured 400+ campus locations without deploying firewalls at every site; why eliminating lateral movement, not just blocking threats at the perimeter, became the design principle; the role of device segmentation in protecting IoT, research instruments, and unmanaged endpoints; and lessons learned scaling Zero Trust across a 125,000-device environment.
Whether you're early in your Zero Trust exploration or looking to extend it to branch locations and IoT, this session provides a real-world blueprint from one of the nation's leading research universities.
