A cloud-delivered security service edge (SSE) solution, grounded in zero trust, designed to give users an exceptional user experience and protected access from any device to anywhere.
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Zscaler Private Access
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Zscaler Private Access™ (ZPA) gives users secure access to private apps and OT devices while enabling zero trust connectivity for workloads.
Cisco as a whole solution, Cisco Secure Access as a solution is very well suited. If you want to simplify the operations and the way that you provide access to certain things, rollout and deployment are fairly straightforward and fairly fast if you know how to configure it properly. Regarding private access, there's still some things that need to be addressed to mitigate certain connections that aren't working correctly through the VPN, or maybe create some kind of exception. The most famous ones are things with Microsoft or other vendors, where, when you send that information through the VPN, split tunnels aren't necessarily the only configurations you have to consider. Things like IPS, decryption, you also have to look at those things as well. It might be good to try to enhance those types of configurations and maybe also document those things so that the users are aware.
Zscaler Private Access works really well in environments setup for FQDNs and where you know what users should/shouldn't be accessing on what ports. You can use Zscaler Private Access to figure out these kinds of features but that doesn't always mean you'll be correct. It also provides a consistent experience for users as they can access their materials anywhere. It also makes the user the last line of defense. If a user's account is compromised then the attacker has access to everything they already did. It doesn't work great in OT environments or Server based environments. Flows have to be initiated from the client and not the server for stuff to behave properly.
Connecting users remotely with a secure connection. I am a service desk agent who works with end users, and if there is an issue due to ZPA, it's most likely due to configuration. A really good service.
Logging, I believe, works well as I troubleshoot end users and can gather extra details for my network admin. IP.zscaler.com, and the debug logs are nice. Additionally, I like how it shows the App policy assigned to the user's machine ECT.
The integration into the Meraki dashboard is not yet complete, you have to use several interfaces to complete the configuration, the services should be fully integrated to provide better handling
Integration of firewall rules onprem and cloud should be standardized
Needs an interface for Support Desk/Help Desk to more easily understand that the problem is a lack of an FQDN or access is not allowed due to policy, not because of a technical shortcoming in ZPA.
Documentation of the BC solution is not well-detailed.
It's simpler to identify or find things within the platform. Obviously, there are always things to improve, maybe in the GUI or in certain things coming over from Umbrella, because this platform is actually adopting a lot of the Umbrella solutions. And it's just a matter of trying to navigate through it. I really like the way it's simplified in how you categorize your internal policies and your private access policies. It's just a different mindset and a different way of creating policies in this case, compared to how Umbrella did in the past with rule sets and those kinds of things. But the actual solution itself works pretty well when you understand it.
The environment feels more secure, and we are seeing that users are adapting to it fast. The fact that we have tools to assist the users with their day-to-day access helps, as we can hand it off to the helpdesk without any escalations to the Network team. It is a work in progress for our agency, but we are seeing the benefits from the solution.
We selected Cisco Secure Access due to the intuitive GUI and ease of use. The agent deployment was simple and easy to maintain. Any additional updates or changes were quickly deployed, and users found the customized block messages useful. From analytics and management, the Secure Access Product has been simple to manage and provides a robust level of security and flexibility that we haven't found in any other product yet.
ZPA is where the bulk of zero-trust access is found. While the functionality for ZIA is excellent, the policy we implement for internet access is more focused on threat prevention and not narrowly scoped access.
We used to get anywhere from 30 to 50 tickets surrounding our previous VPN solution every month. We now average 3-5 tickets regarding remote connectivity, and of those, only 1 or 2 are actual issues with ZPA.
Using ZPA Access Policies, we can now block endpoints that have outdated security software from ever connecting to our environment. This was simply not possible with our previous solution.
Some of our employee base skews older and had a harder time understanding the change from VPN to Zscaler.
There is significantly less downtime with ZPA when compared to other VPN solutions.
