Operational agility in action: MacDonald-Miller’s journey to zero trust

For more than 60 years, MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions has been shaping the Pacific Northwest skyline—designing, building and optimizing mechanical systems that make buildings work better. But behind the scenes, their IT team faced a challenge as complex as any construction blueprint: how to keep a growing, distributed workforce connected and secure without slowing down the business.

“We’re not just sitting in offices,” said Seth Henderson, Director of IT. “Our people are everywhere—at job sites, on customer networks and even in their cars. We needed technology that works wherever they work.”

A connectivity challenge: Distributed workforce, rising risk

When Henderson joined MacDonald-Miller two decades ago, the IT team was just five people. Today, it’s nearly 30 strong—but their mission hasn’t wavered: be a technology partner to the business.

That mission became harder to fulfill as the company expanded and embraced cloud services. Employees were moving between networks constantly, and MacDonald-Millers’ old VPN solution couldn’t keep up.

“Someone would undock their laptop, switch to wireless and suddenly lose access,” Henderson recalled. “They’d have to reboot just to reconnect. It was frustrating—and it slowed people down.”

The turning point came during a visit to a customer site. While connecting to their network, MacDonald-Miller’s laptops detected malicious activity targeting their devices. This experience highlighted a critical truth: security must accompany the user. It accelerated their move to Zero Trust, ensuring protection wherever work happens.

“We saw how quickly things could escalate,” said Aaron Unger, Cloud System Administrator. “That was the moment we knew we needed zero trust.”

Zero trust bolsters operational agility

To modernize connectivity and reduce risk, MacDonald-Miller partnered with Lumen to deploy a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution—and the positive results were immediate.

“The onboarding was the smoothest I’ve ever seen,” Unger said. “Within hours, we had a working solution. By the end of the first day, the configuration was basically done.”

The ZTNA solution gave the IT team real-time visibility into connections, granular access controls and the ability to enforce security policies without sacrificing usability.

“One of the biggest wins was flexibility,” Henderson explained. “If someone needs to step into a different role, we can adjust their access in minutes. That’s huge for a company like ours.”

Performance that drives real impact

The benefits weren’t just technical—they enhanced how employees work every day. Remote engineers who once struggled to download large architectural files saw performance improve up to three times.

“We had one user who couldn’t get into the office,” Unger shared. “After switching to the new solution, he said it was night and day. His productivity skyrocketed.”

The rollout was so smooth that Henderson calls it the company’s most impactful IT change of the year. “Every single person in our technology advisory group said the same thing,” he noted. “This solution changed how we work.”

Future-ready IT for a multi-cloud world

With zero trust in place, MacDonald-Miller is now prioritizing resilience and multi-cloud strategies to mitigate risks from outages and help ensure uninterrupted service.

“Our goal is to make sure we’re always available for our customers,” Henderson said. “This solution is a foundational piece of that strategy.”

For a company that prides itself on making buildings work better, the partnership with Lumen enables their own infrastructure to be just as strong—secure, scalable and ready for whatever comes next.

To learn more about MacDonald Miller’s transformation, read the full customer success story.

Visit our customer story library to learn how organizations in virtually every industry are achieving their business objectives.

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Current Lumen customer compensated for their endorsement.

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