Empowering Distributed Organizations with Zscaler Business Analytics

Organizations are doing their best every day to navigate the challenges of being a distributed enterprise—which can be many.

Employees today work from everywhere: from home, on the road, and increasingly in hybrid return-to-office models. Wherever they are, organizations want their employees to stay productive, empowered by the right SaaS apps and never derailed by IT issues. Meanwhile, they need to address the increased attack surface and enterprise cyber risk that arise from usage of new SaaS apps and users who come and go worldwide.

Struggling to find insights

These trends, part and parcel of digital transformation efforts, underscore a challenge for IT leaders. How can they control the costs and risks (both cyber and productivity) of managing a modern enterprise distributed across SaaS apps, homes, and offices around the world? 

IT leaders seek the right analytics and insights to address these concerns. In conversations with our customers, they often tell us they lack sufficient insights into cyber risk, digital experiences for remote workers, and cost drivers​ like SaaS or poorly optimized office footprints.

They also tell us that, unfortunately, the status quo doesn’t always help.

To gain insights, organizations often either buy expensive point tools or burden their teams with manual data analysis and reporting. Point tools—like network monitoring platforms, SaaS app management, or third-party risk tools—always add overhead but seldom provide the accuracy or complete risk pictures organizations need. And of course, manually analyzing raw data from cyber tools or badge readers, and tracking it all in spreadsheets, proves ineffective and time-consuming.

The Zscaler Business Analytics portfolio

With today's announcement, organizations can turn to the Zscaler Business Analytics portfolio to control the costs and risks that confront distributed enterprises. Zscaler will deliver the right first-party data to guide secure and productive digital transformation journeys.

Zscaler is the only security vendor to deliver a full Business Analytics portfolio.

Zscaler Business Analytics leverages the latest real-time data from across an organization and shapes it into actionable insights using the organization's current Zscaler deployment—with no new tools or vendors needed.

The portfolio consists of three key products:

• Zscaler Digital Experience keeps users productive by rapidly detecting and resolving app, network, and device issues.
• Zscaler Risk360 manages and mitigates cyber risk across all four stages of an attack.
• Zscaler Business Insights optimizes SaaS spend and office utilization.

The Zscaler architectural difference

Before we share more detail on today's news, let's look at why Zscaler is the only security vendor to offer a Business Analytics portfolio.

In a word: architecture. Our inline proxy architecture sits inline with traffic, so all customer traffic flows through Zscaler. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange handles some 320 billion transactions and 500 trillion signals per day. This is more data than other security vendors, and it includes not just security signals, but also user and device activity from which we can deliver our Business Analytics portfolio.

Competing architectures are firewall-oriented, focused on creating a castle-and-moat network, and since they don’t sit inline, they’re incapable of gathering or delivering the data or insights organizations need to guide digital transformation and distributed business.

Unveiling Business Insights

Today, we’re unveiling the newest part of the Zscaler Business Analytics portfolio, Business Insights. Business Insights delivers the right details needed to guide two critical business initiatives: right-sizing SaaS use across the organization and providing key insights to guide back-to-office journeys.

Thanks to Business Insights, IT, procurement, and real estate teams will be able to:

• Index their entire SaaS portfolio to identify cost savings by highlighting unused licenses.
• Automatically identify areas of wastage and app overlap (e.g., multiple comparable UCaaS solutions) through a generative AI-powered app catalog.
• Showcase metrics on an organization’s hybrid work strategy, visualizing global employee footprint across regions and offices to inform decisions on a return-to-office strategy.
• Help optimize office planning for staff such as meals, space, and facilities, by displaying footfall analytics. 

We encourage you to read more in our launch blog post for Business Insights. 

Enhancing cyber risk management with Risk360

Earlier this year, we launched another essential component of the Zscaler Business Analytics portfolio. Zscaler Risk360 empowers organizations to proactively quantify and mitigate cyber risks across the entire attack chain. Leveraging real-time data from an organization's Zscaler environment, it provides intuitive visualizations, financial exposure details, and actionable insights to guide effective risk mitigation strategies. Risk360 helps IT leaders have more productive discussions with boards and executives, enabling them to make informed decisions to protect their organization's digital assets.

Since unveiling Risk360 over the summer, we’ve been hard at work adding new capabilities to help organizations move to a more effective security posture:

• AI-driven cyber maturity assessments use advanced LLMs to generate detailed cyber posture reports showing where organizations are on their zero trust journey.
• New risk factors including CrowdStrike and user-oriented risk factors (UEBA).​
• Expanded financial risk modeling, now including Monte Carlo scenarios.
• Risk framework mappings for MITRE ATT&CK and NIST CSF.
• SEC sample disclosures for S-K Item 106.

See our blog for more details on the enhancements coming to Risk360.

Optimizing digital experiences with ZDX

Organizations need help to gain device, network, and application monitoring insights as their point tools lack the holistic intelligence required by the service desk and network operations teams. To ensure flawless end-user experiences anywhere, these IT teams are under immense pressure to resolve issues and get users back to work faster. Good news! We have recently enhanced Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) to provide IT teams with AI-powered insights to reduce ticket volumes, expedite triage, and simplify collaboration between the service desk and network operation and application teams. Zscaler looks across all devices, networks, and applications and can provide root cause analysis, boosting productivity and end-user satisfaction in seconds.

Zscaler Digital Experience Incident Dashboard

In today's distributed business landscape, gaining the right insights to guide a secure, productive, and informed digital transformation is paramount. Zscaler Business Analytics offers a comprehensive portfolio of solutions that empower organizations to optimize SaaS app usage and costs, enhance cyber risk management, and deliver exceptional digital experiences.

With Business Insights, Risk360, and ZDX, your organization can leverage actionable insights to drive efficiency, reduce costs, and ensure a seamless user experience. By partnering with Zscaler, you can navigate the complexities of the modern business landscape with confidence.