Item: Zscaler Internet Access
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Zscaler Web Security

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Zscaler Web Security is being used globally throughout the entire organisation and 50+ countries. Zscaler makes life easier and more productive for our employees.
How? because via SSO an employee can easily access the internet from any device and do so with very little restrictions.
Why? because Zscaler clearly demonstrates how their ability to scan websites in real-time detects malware and vulnerabilities that would otherwise gone unnoticed.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Zscaler is truly a cloud service, leveraging the capacity and throughput expected from the cloud along with the resilience
Zscaler takes away some of the risks imposed with older machines or poor patching by automatically restricting content to vulnerable agents
Zscaler works in the background and does not interfere with normal user operations. It does so consistently, wherever the individual works in the world

Cons

The pre-baked reports within Zscaler could do with a refresh, add some new reports in-tune with new threats. IE: show me any examples of crypto mining detected in the org
Zscaler could make it easier to clean out expired accounts or those of ex-employees to get a more accurate reading of activity
Failover monitoring for GRE tunnels could be improved although it does work

Return on Investment

Difficult to assess. Zscaler is not cheap but neither are the alternatives. Judging by the reports I receive, the potentially harmful traffic / malware blocked saves from downtime and thus helps pay for itself

Alternatives Considered

I have previously used Websense and Bluecoat, both with mixed results. Zscaler is the superior product if for no other reason that is far easier to deploy and manage

Likelihood to Recommend

The absolute benefit of Zscaler is that it was born in the cloud and thus has no hybrid hangovers such as working with legacy proxy servers. Thus it is a clean system to configure and deploy.
It is a cloud service therefore you need to consider latency and internet traffic flows between your location and their pop. Zscaler have a large footprint to minimize that impact but it is worth examining with your ISP because the most obvious traffic route is not always the result you get.
The net result is that your optimum connection is within a different country which helps performance but geo-location / google searches could confuse people

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Zscaler - minimise the risk of crypto mining exploits