Today, i attended an event organized by Zscaler and was amazed to see offerings they are providing. It is completely different than the way traditional IT security solution works and looked like a future of security. I am writing this post as a summary of my learning from the event, hope this will help at time when you have a discussion on security with your customers.
Let me first discuss the products they are having for different kind of use cases
Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) : If you are looking for Secure, fast access to public Internet and your SaaS based applications like Office 365 , Salesforce etc.. then it is for you.
Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) : It is a product for you if you want to Replace your legacy VPNs, Move your internal apps to the cloud or Provide app-specific access to business partners & contractors without investing much on to hardware appliance or compromising your network.
Let me discuss how it is different than a traditional approach of IT security. In a traditional IT world, in order to access your applications you first need to log into corporate network and then your request goes trough network firewall/network appliances before reaching to internet. This creates 2 big problems :
- Your request goes through multiple hops close to 28 in an enterprise case thus slowness observed and a bad user experience observed
- You utilized your organization MPLS network and other resources which has a limited bandwidth
Zscaler answers above problems as below solution
Here instead of routing traffic to corporate DC, you can simply forward your internet traffic to Zscaler cloud. Now Zscaler cloud will be responsible to providing you all the security features you desire like
- User Authentication, Real IP Source, and Bandwidth Controls
- Dynamic detection of threats on DNS and HTTP
- Full SSL inspection
- Full Log Analysis –Single Pane of Glass
- Anywhere Policy Enforcement
It is really good to see all your headache of managing security is taking care by Zsacler and you will get better user experience. Currently Zscaler is for managing your outbound traffic only. It is not supporting Inbound traffic and you still have to depend on your Firewall to secure Inbound traffic. However with its offering like ZPA for Azure and AWS, it is creating its own market and becoming proven solution for Enterprise security on cloud.
I am looking forward to explore Zscaler in future and introducing my customers to this new way of managing security. Let me know your thoughts on it.. !! Cheers..