Another Milestone: Zscaler’s Daily Transactions Pass Half a Trillion!

The Largest and Most Trusted Security Cloud

In support of our vision for a future built around zero trust, Zscaler’s security technology is served through the world’s largest inline security cloud. What does this mean in practice? Simply, every customer sends traffic destined for the internet or their private applications through an infrastructure cloud operated by Zscaler. The Zero Trust Exchange serves to identify, assess, police, and route that traffic on a session-by-session basis, at considerable scale.

Our customers put their faith in our ability to operate a dependable security cloud that is always available and able to scale to meet growing demand. Zscaler provides a mission-critical service for every one of them. So it is with great pride that we announce the number of daily transactions through our cloud has, for the first time, surpassed 500 billion!

We would never have reached this staggering scale without the vote of confidence each and every one of our customers consistently places in Zscaler.

Exponential Growth

Zscaler was conceived as a service that would offer the “zenith of scalability”, from which the company name was derived. The early Zscaler team knew that a scalable architecture would be fundamental for the company’s growth, so we have always invested to stay one step ahead, maintaining capacity to spare, and a performant experience. Today, more than 160 Zscaler hosted Zero Trust Exchange cloud edges around the world work together to process this incredible volume of daily transactions.

What Is a Transaction?

Every time you interact with an application or service you’re creating a transaction. One simple example would be when you want to visit a web page. A query is made to a DNS server to identify the IP address of the web server, and this is returned to you so that an IP connection can be built. That’s one transaction. An HTTP request is then made to the web server which comes back with an HTTP response. That’s another transaction. With Zscaler’s proxy security model every one of these transactions passes through the Zero Trust Exchange. Needless to say that across Zscaler’s many thousands of customers these add up quickly!

Understanding 500 Billion Daily Transactions

How can we visualize a number this big? Here are a few fun facts about 500 billion:

• That’s almost 60x the number of Google searches per day
• 500 billion gallons of water is enough to fill over 750,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools
• 500 billion trees could cover an area the size of the United States
• 500 billion dollar bills laid on their side would reach 1.3 times around the Earth
• Counting from 1 to 500 billion at a rate of one number per second would take more than 15,700 years…

…fortunately Zscaler can handle 500 billion a little faster than that!

Threats and Opportunities

So how does having such a high transaction count help Zscaler and its customers? First and foremost, traffic inspection at this scale helps identify threats, established and zero day, that have the potential to do real damage.

Zscaler blocks over 150M threats every day, amounting to approximately 57 billion threats over a recent one-year period. That’s perhaps an even more important number than the transaction count, demonstrating real-world threat avoidance that could have impacted organizations around the world. As our recent ThreatLabz report showed, threats continue to escalate, leading to a 17.8% increase in ransomware attacks over the past year. What we learn as we discover threats we are able to pass on for the benefit of all.

On the flip side, the metadata created as a result of the relentless increase in transactions through the Zero Trust Exchange helps inform Zscaler’s Digital Experience Monitoring tool (ZDX) and strengthen defenses through better risk management. In 2024, operating the world’s largest security cloud means having the broadest data set with which to take the fight back to the criminals exploiting AI for nefarious purposes.

Relentless Focus on Performance and Availability

Staying on top of cloud service demand is a top priority for Zscaler, so we continue to invest in new data centers around the world to ensure ample capacity is available where it’s most needed. The global distribution of these data centers, aligned with population centers, leads to shorter round-trip delays and better performance for our customers, who can use the Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) toolset to troubleshoot any issues that arise.

The bold claims we make for our cloud are backed by rigorous service level agreements (SLAs) that are based on percentage of lost transactions as a result of downtime or slowness, rather than time the service is unavailable, as is typical with other vendors. In other words, Zscaler focuses on actual business impact, because we know that’s what our customers ultimately care about.

Summary

At Zscaler, it is our passion to provide a dependable, secure SaaS cloud service that eliminates cyberthreats around the clock and helps our customers stay confidently focused on what they do best. We wouldn’t have reached this incredible milestone without the faith that more than 8,500 organizations around the world put in us every day.

Get in touch or or reach out to your account team to learn more about how our security cloud reliably protects your most valuable data, wherever your employees are located. And if Business Continuity is on your radar, be sure to sign-up for this webinar where we'll be covering enhancements to our already industry-leading resilience solutions.