AWS Control Tower vs. Zscaler Internet Access

We were wanting to prove the concept of a low touch process for quickly spinning up boilerplate AWS environments. We were able to get started quickly and to ensure that the AWS Well-Architected Framework principles were followed - at least upfront - however, we found that for our use case and expertise level it ultimately wasn't a fit. We have the skills on our team to manage more of this on our own. My recommendation would be contingent on what skills are already available on your team: if you can "do it yourself" you might as well so that you don't pay for resources you don't need and you have finer grain control over what's created.

Incentivized

It's best suited for a distributed remote workforce, securing internet access for users from anywhere. Suitable for highly regulated industries, such as banking and Healthcare. Not a good fit for an organisation where most of its legacy is in an on-premises environment. Bandwidth-intensive industries like media/entertainment firms.

Incentivized

• Easily create new AWS accounts.
• Easily secure and manage AWS accounts.
• Landing zone with SSO is a huge win for larger teams.

Incentivized

• Single Pane of Glass Management - Everything is very easy to access and monitor the entire environment from an internet security perspective.
• Install Flexibility - We can and do install Zscaler Internet Access on both our client devices as well as our SD-WAN appliances and servers. This allows us to control internet security even on devices without an agent in our networks.

Incentivized

• The AWS SSO GUI is not very intuitive and determining how to apply policies to users without creating redundant logins has been a challenge.
• The default guardrails do not fully encompass all the security checks that we needed.
• There does not appear to be any way to control roles at the IAM level from the control tower account through the GUI.
• Some features on AWS accounts still require logging into the individual account with the root user and cannot be done from AWS Control Tower.

Incentivized

• The logs feel kind of lack luster
• When issues are arising with SSL Inspection, logs show everything working despite end user experience
• Could use some kind of global find functionality or something that would allow you to search the entire configuration for matching URLs and the like

Incentivized

While Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) delivers critical value in cloud security and RBI compliance, I rate renewal likelihood 7/10 due to evolving needs versus platform limitations. Below is my rationale:

Key Gaps:

1. Advanced Threat Costs:

ZIA’s add-ons (e.g., Advanced DLP, Sandboxing) incur 35%+ cost premiums – straining budgets as transaction volumes (UPI/iMobile) grow 50% YoY.

2. API Banking Scalability:

ZIA’s API rate limits throttle real-time policy sync during UPI peaks (10K+ TPS), forcing workarounds for finacle integrations.

3. RBI Future-Proofing:

Limited native support for upcoming digital rupee (CBDC) security rules requires custom development, increasing compliance overhead.

Incentivized

There is no way to easily close an AWS account whether it was created manually or via the AWS Control Tower. It takes too many steps to close it vs to provision a new AWS account

Incentivized

The application is easy to install and configure on all Windows devices. To troubleshoot any internet issue, we can easily collect all the relevant logs from Zscaler and check the exact issue. The only problem is with the uninstall, as a dedicated crew needs to provide the password.

Incentivized

There are often performance issues reported

Incentivized

Zscaler's ZIA support is quick and knowledgable. They respond within 1-2 hours of you submitting your ticket. They are very thorough and are typically ready to jump on a live troubleshooting session. Our ZIA platform and how we use is it unique so at times tickets can be open for weeks but we alway get quality support compared to other unrelated product support in our enterprise

Incentivized

Using AWS Systems Manager and other slightly lower level components has been helpful for us to manage parts of our AWS presence at a more granular level than AWS Control Tower was designed for. It's not at all an apples-to-apples comparison as they solve different use cases, but for us, the use case associated with AWS Systems Manager was a better fit for our specific needs and skillsets. We did not need everything that AWS Control Tower was doing for us.

Incentivized

Zscaler Intenet Access outperformed the competition due to its lightning-fast policy delivery and cross-compatibility. It is easy to track employee usage and block unnecessary websites, reducing company internet usage. Zscalar installed on every system increases cloud-based software bandwidth, decreasing user turnaround time and increasing efficiency.

Incentivized

• Less time manually deploying accounts which was error prone.
• Central logging allowed us to have 1 place to view logs.

Incentivized

• Has allowed us to remove other products that were suboptimal
• Saved us money overall by stacking it with other Zscaler products
• Created a more secure work environment for our users through intelligent internet policies that are not needlessly restrictive while still maintaining security best practices

Incentivized