If there is one thing that is constant in the last decade, it’s the uptick in the number of organizations that build apps and rely on the cloud to run their businesses. As the cloud security leader, Zscaler secures the traffic and data for more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies, making Zscaler a critical component of the technology stack. Zscaler’s unique architecture, based on zero trust principles, places the Zscaler platform in the path of the organizations’ egress and ingress traffic enabling efficient routing, inspection, and security policy enforcement while enhancing the overall user experience. Today, Zscaler processes over 250 billion transactions every single day which is a testament to how much our customers trust and love our products.
Avoid costly business interruption
At Zscaler, we strive to delight our customers with innovations that make organizations more agile, efficient, and secure. We also understand how critical Zscaler is to our customers’ organizations and make the reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) of our products a top priority for the company. Zscaler products have a long history of near-perfect uptime and are backed by best-in-class service level agreements (SLAs)—but we don’t want to stop there.
Staying true to our commitment to support uninterrupted operations for our customers, today, Zscaler is announcing the limited availability of Zscaler’s Disaster Recovery Solution - a customer-controlled business continuity solution to keep organizations operational even during a catastrophic event that might interrupt the global Zscaler cloud. With Zscaler’s Disaster Recovery solution, customers can control what business-critical private or SaaS applications users can access even during a black swan event, regardless of whether the user is in the office or in a remote location. In today’s world where hybrid work is the norm, Zscaler allows for uninterrupted services to all applications, eliminating downtime and ensuring high user productivity.
Seamless experience for private, SaaS, and web applications
To access applications in the event of a Zscaler Cloud outage, Zscaler’s disaster recovery (DR) leverages the same architectural components such as Zscaler Client Connector and Zscaler Private Service Edges that customers have already deployed, making the switch from normal operating mode to the DR mode seamless for the user.
During an outage, the admin can switch to the DR mode by simply updating the DNS TXT records. Once in DR mode, existing users automatically get access to a limited set of pre-identified critical private applications to support business operations in a seamless fashion.
For accessing critical internet or SaaS apps, customers can configure how access is granted to minimize impact. In the event of a catastrophic failure of the Zscaler cloud, Zscaler’s DR solution for SaaS and web traffic can be configured to either default to a customer-specified list for sites that are allowed or denied access, fail-open to allow access to the open internet for uninterrupted productivity, or fail-close to block access to the internet for maximum security.
Image: how access to applications is granted when operating in the DR mode
Upon restoration of the Zscaler Cloud functionality, the product can be returned back to normal operation to take full advantage of the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange to enable the best of zero trust security and connectivity. The flexibility for the customer to determine what applications are accessed in the DR mode, combined with the ease with which the Zscaler platform can switch between the DR mode and normal operations, gives the best security and user experience that is unrivaled in the industry.
We are always striving for the best when it comes to reliability, availability and serviceability but are always prepared for the scenarios that are beyond our direct control. Zscaler’s globally supported capability is currently being tested by a handful of customers and we expect to roll this out for general availability soon. Disaster recovery is a topic we discuss with customers consistently and care about the RAS capabilities of our platform very deeply. We are hearing really great things from our customers testing our limited availability solution for DR and we cannot wait to roll this out more broadly.
You can read more about Zscaler’s Disaster Recovery in this solution brief.
Stay tuned for more updates
