How Zscaler Provides an Unrivaled Zero Trust Architecture

In today’s highly digital world, where remote work and cloud applications are the norm, organizations need zero trust—not network-centric architectures built for the on-premises-only world of yesterday. 

Zero trust is a unique architecture that functions based on the principle of least-privileged access, whereby users can only connect to the resources they need in order to do their jobs. It is delivered as a service from a global, purpose-built cloud that serves as an intelligent switchboard. The architecture provides secure, any-to-any connectivity without extending network access to anyone or anything, and it enforces context-aware policies that reduce cyber risk. Zero trust stands in stark contrast to network-centric architectures built with firewalls and VPNs, which aim to secure access to trusted networks that connect everything in organizations’ IT ecosystems (leading to systematic weaknesses you can read about here).

While it can feel difficult to identify the ideal platform for implementing a zero trust architecture, organizations can streamline and enhance their decision making by scrutinizing vendors’ offerings across five key pillars. Naturally, as Zscaler is the original pioneer and continued innovator in zero trust, its Zero Trust Exchange platform is unsurpassed across all of the criteria. Below, one can find these five pillars and see how Zscaler addresses them in an unrivaled fashion. 

A highly differentiated architecture

Modern organizations need a zero trust architecture that secures any-to-any connectivity—covering users, workloads, internet of things (IoT) and operational technology (OT) devices, branch sites, and third parties. While some vendors only offer zero trust connectivity for users accessing apps, a truly comprehensive zero trust offering must protect any entity accessing any IT resource.

To ensure least-privileged access that keeps all of the aforementioned entities off the network, zero trust platforms need to provide fully brokered connections rather than route-based access. But when routable IPs are involved, it is a tell-tale sign of the latter—that is, a network-centric approach that is at odds with zero trust and impedes proper security. Unfortunately, most providers fall short in this area, particularly when it comes to access scenarios involving SD-WAN.

Because zero trust platforms process all of their customers’ traffic and are responsible for extending any-to-any connectivity, they are mission-critical services that must ensure constant uptime. As such, full business continuity and resilience capabilities across both management and data planes are crucial for maintaining security and productivity.

The Zscaler difference

Zscaler’s platform sets the standard by offering a unique and complete zero trust architecture that delivers on these essential needs:

• Zero trust for any entity: Secure any-to-any connectivity—not just for users, but also for IoT and OT, workloads, branches, third parties, and apps.
• Fully brokered connections: Eliminate the use of routable IPs through fully brokered connections that ensure least-privileged access and keep entities off the network.
• True resilience: Leverage full business continuity capabilities across management and data planes to ensure constant uptime, security, and productivity.

Ultimately, Zscaler’s highly differentiated platform provides a zero trust architecture tailored to the complex needs of modern businesses and their IT ecosystems.

Market leadership and cloud security innovation

Choosing a security partner is not just about solving today's security challenges—it's about positioning your business for future success. When choosing a zero trust platform, the stability and reliability of the partner matter just as much as their ability to innovate and their solution's technical capabilities. You're not just evaluating their current strengths—you're considering their ability to grow with you, support you through novel security needs, and remain stable over the years.

First, as you evaluate security providers, you’ll want to prioritize the ability to innovate as a key selection criterion. Vendors should have “firsts” they can point to that demonstrate histories of consistent innovation and show their capacities to solve novel security challenges. Similarly, providers must dedicate significant sums of money to research and development if they are to pave the way with pioneering solutions that compel others to follow them. It’s also a good idea to search for any awards or third-party validations of their offerings from firms like Gartner and Forrester.

Demonstrable financial stability is another key priority when selecting a strategic vendor for your zero trust transformation. Without it, vendors will face challenges in delivering on their promises, and financial pressure could prevent them from keeping their solutions ahead of the latest threats, providing ongoing support, or even staying in business at all.

The Zscaler difference

Partnering with Zscaler provides strategic benefits that go beyond short-term fixes. Zscaler is the original creator of cloud SWG and ZTNA, a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for 13 consecutive years (in SWG and SSE), and a company that boasts $499 million in R&D investments in its most recent fiscal year. In other words, Zscaler has a proven history of driving innovation and is positioned to do more of the same in the future. In terms of market leadership and financial strength, Zscaler offers the stability you need to navigate challenging economic times. The publicly traded company is part of the Nasdaq-100 Index, and it generated $2.5 billion in ARR in its most recent fiscal year. 

Zscaler’s strong market position, backed by its ability to innovate, ensures that IT leaders always have access to top-tier protection. We're not just securing your present—we're future-proofing your security.

Proven operational excellence

Architectural expertise, platform scalability, and quantifiable customer satisfaction are three key markers of a leading zero trust vendor with proven operational excellence. First, delivering a zero trust architecture as a service involves the complex task of proxying customer traffic and enforcing real-time security policies. Because this requires extensive expertise in providing inline security services, organizations should select only platforms with a demonstrable history of being up to the challenge. 

Similarly, it’s important to choose a vendor with a cloud platform that exhibits a high degree of scalability, which is necessary to handle the traffic demands of large and growing organizations (particularly when it comes to encrypted traffic). But even for smaller organizations, poor scalability means impaired security and productivity. 

Finally, quantifiable proof of customer satisfaction, such as a strong Net Promoter Score (NPS), is essential when evaluating a zero trust partner. Lacking such a measurement suggests that a platform may not be able to meet customers’ demands.

The Zscaler difference

Zscaler has over 15 years of experience delivering at-scale, inline security services. Its deep architectural expertise and mastery of proxying traffic are unrivaled in the industry.  When it comes to scalability, Zscaler lives up to its name, which is short for “Zenith of Scalability.” The Zero Trust Exchange comprises 160 data centers around the world that process more than 500 billion customer transactions and 500 trillion telemetry signals every day. This scale demonstrates the ease with which the platform can deliver uninterrupted service to organizations of all sizes—even as their needs evolve. In terms of customer satisfaction, Zscaler has a Net Promoter Score of more than 70; for comparison, the average SaaS company has an NPS of 30. To put this simply, customers enjoy working with the company and using its Zero Trust Exchange platform.

In summary, Zscaler has unparalleled operational excellence that is evinced by a track record of architectural expertise, unprecedented scalability, and quantifiable customer success. It is a perfect fit for both your present and future needs.

Complete cyberthreat protection

An effective zero trust offering should be able to identify and stop new cyberthreats rapidly. To do so, it needs to have massive cloud scale. In that way, it can harness the large volumes of traffic it processes and the countless threats it sees to quickly identify emerging threats, wherever they may occur, and push updates to all of its customers so that they can stay safe. This cloud-scale advantage ensures that organizations are secure against cybercriminals’ latest malicious schemes.

To protect you against hidden adversaries that have already made their way into your organization’s IT ecosystem, a zero trust platform should provide means to lure and detect them. In other words, it should employ what are commonly known as honeypots, or realistic decoys designed to entice attackers hiding in your environment. When adversaries interact with these decoys, they can generate high-fidelity alerts and notify security teams of uncovered threats. 

Next, compromised identities are among cybercriminals’ favorite mechanisms for launching cyberattacks. As such, zero trust platforms must include identity threat detection and response (ITDR) functionality, which allows organizations to secure misconfigured and compromised identities that could be (or are being) exploited by cybercriminals. 

As a final note, built-in risk management is also an important part of a complete zero trust architecture. Organizations need holistic risk measurement that allows them to visualize and understand cyber risk across their IT ecosystems, as well as prioritization of their most significant vulnerabilities so they can know what to remediate first.

The Zscaler difference

The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform incorporates all of the cyberthreat protection elements mentioned above:

• The Zscaler cloud effect: Stop zero-day attacks with the world’s largest inline security cloud, which, after identifying a new threat anywhere, automatically blocks it for all customers. 
• ITDR: Gain continuous auditing of your identity infrastructure, enhance your identity hygiene, and detect and stop identity-based threats in real time.
• Deception technology: Lure attackers with decoy assets that automatically generate alerts for your security teams and enable them to remediate hidden threats.
• Risk360 and Unified Vulnerability Management: Leverage comprehensive risk quantification along with intelligent prioritization of your most critical vulnerabilities.  

With Zscaler’s cloud scale, cyberthreat protection capabilities, and risk management functionality, your organization can face cyberattacks head-on and systematically reduce cyber risk both now and in the future.

Comprehensive data protection

Manually configuring data protection solutions is a laborious process. Admins have to set up data loss prevention (DLP) dictionaries and classification policies with a high degree of precision and regularly update them, as well. Because of this overhead-intensive process, automation is critically important today—effective data protection now requires artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to keep pace with the growing complexity of data flows. As such, a leading zero trust platform, which is supposed to protect data when any entity accesses any IT resource, must leverage AI and ML to automatically find and classify sensitive data across devices, networks, and cloud environments. This comprehensive, automated protection eliminates the time and cost of manual configuration—particularly when admins would otherwise need to duplicate policies across disjointed point products.

As mentioned previously, a zero trust architecture is supposed to secure any-to-any connectivity. This includes securing unmanaged devices (which can be employees’ personal endpoints or those of third-party organizations) as they access private and SaaS apps. But installing software agents on these devices is infeasible, and agentless reverse proxies feature limited app catalogs and frequent breakages. So, for optimal productivity and data protection, zero trust platforms need agentless browser isolation, which streams app sessions to unmanaged devices as pixels. This offers a native user experience for any app without allowing sensitive data to reach unmanaged endpoints.

Another key part of securing any entity accessing any IT resource is securing users as they access private applications. Surprisingly, not all zero trust platforms can enforce inline DLP policies in such a scenario. As such, make sure you select a vendor who can protect your data in real time and wherever it goes—even when users are accessing private apps. 

Effective zero trust vendors also need to empower customers to manage their data security postures across public cloud environments. In other words, they must offer granular insights into where data is stored, who uses it, how it is used, and the risks of misconfigurations that could expose it to theft. With these insights, organizations can address vulnerabilities before they can lead to data breaches.

When a data protection policy is broken, the subsequent incident management is usually a cumbersome process. Disjointed workflows take time from all involved parties and distract them from more important job duties. In light of this, a leading zero trust platform needs to be able to automate incident management so that organizations can become more efficient and their workers can focus on creating value.

The Zscaler difference

Zscaler Data Protection delivers all of the capabilities necessary to completely and efficiently secure your sensitive information:

• AI-Powered auto data discovery: Leverage AI and ML to automatically find and classify sensitive data across your entire IT ecosystem—without the need to manually configure any dictionaries or classification policies. 
• Agentless browser isolation: Secure unmanaged devices accessing any private or SaaS apps, protect data by preventing copying, pasting, printing, and downloading, and ensure a safe, seamless user experience with no agents or reverse proxies.
• Inline data protection for private app access: Enforce real-time data protection policies that can prevent risky file downloads when users access private applications, whether they are hosted in the cloud or on-premises.
• Data security posture management (DSPM): Gain granular visibility into your data across multi-cloud environments, along with continuous monitoring, assessment, and optimization of the security controls that protect it.  
• Workflow automation: Streamline incident management with workflow automation that coaches end users and reduces time requirements for the parties that have to respond when data protection policies are violated.

With Zscaler’s all-in-one data protection offering, your organization gains the ability to protect sensitive information wherever it goes, as well as improve productivity through automation and AI.

Zscaler: Zero trust you can trust

If your organization is looking to implement a zero trust architecture that will give you everything you need in order to transform your security with confidence, Zscaler is the partner for you. The Zero Trust Exchange platform has highly differentiated architecture, a history of market leadership and innovation, proven operational excellence, and comprehensive cyberthreat and data protection.