TaskUs had two primary needs. First was cost containment, since the name of the game in offshoring is cost efficiency for their customers. Even more urgently, they needed the ability to rapidly spin up delivery centers to support their customers in solving the new and complex challenges that AI can bring. Both, unfortunately, were challenging to solve within the constraints of their current architecture.

TaskUs found itself locked into expensive, inflexible infrastructure requirements. Every new delivery center required redundant firewalls costing $60K-$150K each, and the company’s existing infrastructure also carried crippling expenses. As their user base grew, they faced hundreds of thousands of dollars in firewall upgrades just to handle basic capabilities like web filtering. The firewalls had to decrypt and re-encrypt all traffic for inspection, which was compute-intensive and limited their agility. As a result, when they needed to quickly spin up temporary locations for high-value projects — in timeframes as short as a weekend — the combination of long lag time for firewall appliances and high capital costs made it nearly impossible.

User onboarding and deployment presented another major pain point. With TaskUs creating a completely custom setup based on its customers' tools and security requirements, TaskUs technical staff spent hours in user acceptance testing cycles for each new and unique project. The org’s traditional control enforcement methods, installed security applications, and infrastructure firewalls created slow feedback loops where problems had to be reported, fixed, and tested in rigid repetition.

The security team also lacked centralized insight into and control over their distributed workforce, which largely worked in the Chrome browser. As third-party contractors accessing customers' data, TaskUs needed to guarantee they were accessing these sensitive back-office systems securely. But traditional browsers simply could not provide granular visibility into what their 65,000 employees were doing. “The black box of the traditional browser was not giving us the visibility and control that we needed and not protecting the user data to the level our infosec standards required,” says Eric Lowe, TaskUs’s Director of InfoSec Risk Management.

Because each new client brought different security protocols and requirements, TaskUs was forced to constantly adapt their infrastructure and processes. Then came the turning point. About two and a half years ago, a bank approached TaskUs about potential services. TaskUs had worked with many financial services customers, and Lowe knew they would have their work cut out for them in building to the often burdensome security standards financial companies often required.

Instead, the bank offered a surprisingly simple solution. "This bank said, ‘Oh, just download this Island browser, it's all you have to do,’" Eric explained — a straightforward proposal that felt almost shocking after years of complex security arrangements. “That was my light bulb moment to look at Island browser as a product and at the enterprise browser as a new concept." The enterprise browser was a perfect fit with TaskUs’s core ethos of deploying technology that works with people, not around them — driving efficiency and delivering elevated services with greater effectiveness, vigilance, and humanity.