Zscaler Named a Top CRN Tech Innovator for Zero Trust SASE & SD-WAN

Each year, CRN's prestigious Tech Innovator Awards celebrate the forefront of technological advancement, honoring products and services that redefine possibilities for solution providers in the tech channel. These awards recognize cutting-edge solutions that offer groundbreaking capabilities, setting a new standard for innovation and excellence in the industry.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Zscaler, a trailblazer in the realm of cybersecurity and networking, proudly emerged as a winner in CRN's 2024 Tech Innovator Awards in both the Security Service Edge (SSE) and SD-WAN categories: the two elements that together make up SASE (Secure Access Service Edge). This recognition underscores Zscaler's commitment to pushing boundaries and delivering top-notch solutions that cater to the evolving needs of the IT landscape. We are extremely excited to bring our new take on SASE to the market, and so we couldn’t be happier to have been recognized for our innovation.

The history of SASE

SASE was first coined as a term by Gartner back in 2019, but with the arrival of the pandemic the focus shifted to overlaying cloud security on top of existing physical infrastructure to power the explosion in remote work, so all the attention went to SSE, the security component of SASE.

As an early pioneer and ongoing innovator in SSE, Zscaler has dominated as the market leader, to this day. Now that the pandemic is in the rear view mirror, attention is returning to the infrastructure that underpins SSE, and therefore to SASE which adds a WAN edge component to SSE, for connectivity.

The problem is that the SD-WAN of the 2010s is unfit for the 2020s because it extends networks with VPNs, enabling lateral movement. If a network is compromised there is greater risk due to the implicitly trusting nature of IP networking. Overcoming this weakness leads to a proliferation of expensive and complex security point solutions that continue to suffer security vulnerabilities, as we have seen in 2024.

Zscaler Zero Trust SASE

Earlier this year Zscaler announced Zero Trust SASE, built with a reimagined SD-WAN solution that avoids putting anything on the network. Zero Trust SD-WAN is a transformative approach to connecting users, workloads, devices across disparate locations to their peer servers and applications, whether on the internet, in a private cloud, or a physical data center, without putting them on a routable network. Zero Trust SD-WAN instead builds all connections directly via the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, for unparalleled cloud security.

CRN's Tech Innovator Awards, with their stringent criteria focusing on product functionality, importance to channel partners, and solution provider endorsements, serve as a testament to Zscaler's commitment to excellence and innovation. By winning in categories like SSE and SD-WAN (with Zscaler Zero Trust SD-WAN), Zscaler has once again proven its prowess in delivering cutting-edge solutions that redefine the tech landscape.

To explore more about Zscaler's award-winning Zero Trust SASE/SD-WAN solutions, watch our announcement and technical breakout videos, both available on our SASE resources page, and embark on a path towards a more secure and connected future.