How Huitt-Zollars built a future-ready digital foundation with Lumen

For more than 50 years, Huitt‑Zollars has shaped the infrastructure Americans rely on every day—from iconic Dallas bridges to major transit systems, military installations, theme parks and the essential water, transportation and civic facilities that keep communities moving.

 As a multidisciplinary architecture and engineering firm with nearly 25 offices nationwide and approximately 600 employee‑owners, their legacy is built on a rare combination of technical excellence, creativity and a deeply held belief in serving the public with integrity.

But today, designing the physical world increasingly depends on mastering the digital one. With massive data files, cross-country teams, defense‑related security requirements and an ever‑evolving threat landscape, Huitt‑Zollars needed a modern, secure, highly reliable network backbone. They also needed a trusted technology partner who understood both the complexity of their mission and the urgency of supporting it.

For more than three decades, Lumen has been that partner—and together, they’ve transformed Huitt‑Zollars’ connectivity, collaboration, cybersecurity and operational resilience for the next 50 years and beyond.

A business built on collaboration meets the demands of a digital world

Huitt‑Zollars’ work spans seven major practice areas: transportation, public works, federal facilities, urban development, industrial, institutional and commercial. Many projects require distributed teams of planners, architects, engineers, surveyors, field crews, project managers and external stakeholders across states to collaborate in real time.

The firm’s data footprint is staggering. Comparing the size of today’s project files to the early days of digital design, Huitt-Zollars’ VP of Information Technology, Glen Ridnour, notes, “Our first major transit project stored 2.5 GB of data—once a massive number. However today, the firm manages over 300 terabytes of active files, models and renderings.”

Bandwidth, speed and low‑latency connectivity aren’t conveniences. They are mission‑critical. Meanwhile, security requirements have intensified, especially for federal work governed by CMMC and other stringent compliance frameworks. As cyberattacks grow in frequency and sophistication, Huitt‑Zollars needed modern protection without hiring a 24/7 in‑house security team.

Why Huitt‑Zollars chose Lumen

Huitt‑Zollars’ partnership with Lumen dates back decades, continuing across multiple generations of technology. The firm has long valued the expertise, customer service and reliability that Lumen provides, and recently served as a customer reference for Gartner research because of their strong experience.

“It’s a long‑time partnership that continues to evolve. Glen has always been an advocate for us, and in turn, we want to be an equal partner not only to him in return, but to their entire business,” said Erick Gaston, Lumen Account Manager, who oversees the Huitt-Zollars account.

When Huitt‑Zollars committed to modernizing its infrastructure, Lumen became the natural partner to guide them forward—not just with point solutions, but with a holistic strategy.

Building a modern, secure, high‑performance network

Today, Huitt‑Zollars relies on an integrated ecosystem of Lumen connectivity and security services, including:

• Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) across all offices
• Enterprise Broadband for secondary, diverse‑path redundancy
• Fortinet SASE, fully managed by Lumen
• VSOC (Virtual Security Operations Center)
• Managed SIEM
• Cyber Incident Response Services
• CMMC Compliance Consulting
• Attack Surface Management (in deployment)

This combination allows Huitt‑Zollars to operate like a digitally native organization while maintaining the rigor required of a federal contractor.

“The partnership with Lumen has been instrumental in helping us secure our networks and our data—without having to build a 24/7 security team internally,” Ridnour shared. “There is absolutely no way we could run round‑the‑clock monitoring with our 10‑person IT department and almost 600 users.”

A turning point: Navigating CMMC and security modernization

One of the most impactful phases of the partnership focused on navigating the complex CMMC (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification) landscape—a challenging requirement for firms doing Department of Defense‑related work.

Huitt‑Zollars faced issues common to many organizations:

• Maintaining secure workflows across distributed teams
• Lack of internal bandwidth to manage compliance documentation
• Difficulty defining scope and selecting a compliant enclave
• Rapid growth in cyberthreats
• Increasing pressure from insurers and clients around audit readiness

The consulting team at Lumen helped Huitt‑Zollars through a multi‑year transformation that included assessing their environment, selecting a secure enclave provider (Summit 7), aligning operational processes and implementing additional protections like Managed SIEM and VSOC.

“They didn’t know what they didn’t know—and we were able to guide them from start to finish,” said Edward Raibick, Lumen Security Program Manager.

This work not only strengthened Huitt‑Zollars’ security posture, but also gave their leadership confidence that the company could continue serving sensitive federal programs without disruption.

Looking ahead: Attack surface management & AI‑driven workflows

With its DIA, Fortinet SASE, VSOC and CMMC frameworks in place, Huitt‑Zollars is now preparing for the next frontier: proactive Attack Surface Management (ASM). This will help the firm automatically detect vulnerabilities, prioritize risks and measure security maturity over time.

“ASM will guide us in determining where to focus our efforts and resources—giving us clearer metrics for security improvements,” Ridnour explained.

AI is also poised to play a transformative role. Huitt‑Zollars is already using AI‑enabled tools for proposal development and content search, and they envision expanded use in:

• Visualizing alternative design concepts
• Accelerating engineering calculations
• Improving cross‑project knowledge discovery
• Enhancing modeling accuracy
• Unlocking insights from decades of project data

As Ridnour put it: “AI is useless without high‑quality data and a secure, reliable network to deliver it.”

And that’s exactly what Lumen has helped them build.

To learn more about Huitt-Zollars’ 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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