Organizations everywhere are grappling with economic uncertainty. Day in and day out, they are forced to respond to increasing financial pressures that do not seem to be going away in the foreseeable future. While one may assume that security, networking, and IT teams are insulated from this pressure due to their responsibility for the ongoing safety and operational functioning of their companies, that is sadly not the case. They also are faced with shrinking headcounts, tightening budgets, and the need to do more with fewer resources.
How can these teams respond?
This six-part blog series explains how Zscaler, the One True Zero Trust Platform, saves money for its customers. Be sure to explore our previous installments that each discuss a key way that Zscaler delivers these savings:
- Part 1: Enhancing Security Posture
- Part 2: Optimizing Technology Costs
- Part 3: Increasing Operational Efficiency
- Part 4: Improving User Productivity
- Part 5: Streamlining M&A
This sixth and final installment in this blog series focuses on the enterprise’s carbon footprint.
Appliances: The root of all evil
Standard, perimeter-based architectures inevitably entail the use of hardware appliances—and not just a few, but dozens or even hundreds. Whether for security or networking purposes, appliances have fixed capacities to deliver a particular level of service. So, as organizations grow, the prevailing strategy is to purchase additional or more powerful hardware to achieve the capacity necessary for servicing the expanding enterprise. As they do so, organizations regularly overprovision to avoid outages during traffic surges; in other words, they purchase powerful equipment with excess capacity that usually goes unused. Complicating this further is the fact that security appliances are often point products, and addressing new risks usually means deploying additional hardware solutions.
With all of the above in mind, if a company opens a branch site, it is common for this stack of appliances (or at least a portion of it) to be duplicated at the new location. This quickly multiplies the number of appliances in use. In addition to the heavy CapEx incurred using this approach, it dramatically expands an organization’s carbon footprint.
Bad for the environment and worse for your wallet
Deploying appliances means increasing the organization’s energy utilization. This comes from a combination of keeping the appliances themselves running, as well as using the high-powered cooling systems necessary to keep them from overheating. The associated electricity consumption has detrimental effects on the environment, but also means that organizations will face massive utilities costs. Even for smaller companies with fewer appliances, these costs will still be significant relative to their size.
Figure 1: More appliances mean more power consumption
Getting green with Zscaler
As the world’s largest security cloud, the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange delivers security as a service. This means that customers don’t have to install, power, or cool additional appliances when they deploy the One True Zero Trust Platform. And by delivering comprehensive security that is consistent with Gartner’s vision for security service edge (SSE), Zscaler eliminates up to 90% of customers’ point product appliances, meaning they can significantly reduce their power requirements, carbon footprints, and energy bills.
To further decrease the environmental impact of security, the Zero Trust Exchange is built upon an efficient, multi-tenant architecture that maximizes the use of resources. Additionally, Zscaler’s 150 points of presence around the world are powered by 100% renewable energy. The company also proudly maintains carbon neutral status and plans to achieve net zero emissions by 2025.
Figure 2: Key benefits of the Zero Trust Exchange
On average, Zscaler enhances customer power usage effectiveness (PUE) by 50%, demonstrating the strength of the Zero Trust Exchange when it comes to reducing an organization’s carbon footprint and power consumption. This is one of several reasons that the average Zscaler customer experiences a return on investment (ROI) of 139%, as detailed in this ESG Economic Validation study.
To learn more about how Zscaler saves money for customers, download our white paper. Or, to see the real-world success stories of customers who saved money by embracing the Zero Trust Exchange, download our ebook.
