Being responsible with financial resources has always been a concern for companies the world over. But with the economic uncertainty of the last few years, organizations have increased their focus on the need to save money. As a result, networking, security, and IT teams have been tasked to do more with fewer resources. Naturally, reduced headcounts and shrinking budgets make it difficult for these teams to do their jobs.
So what’s the good news?
This blog series details the various ways that Zscaler, the One True Zero Trust Platform, helps its customers to save money. Part one explains how enhancing security posture helps with avoiding breach-related costs. Part two reveals the way that Zscaler can simplify infrastructure and optimize technology costs. Part three covers how organizations can increase their operational efficiency and reduce management overhead.
This fourth installment revolves around:
Decreased user productivity
Poor user experiences are a leading cause of impaired productivity. When employees’ digital experiences slow to a crawl, they are unable to perform their work duties effectively. In other words, time, money, and value-creation opportunities are wasted. Unsurprisingly, perimeter-based architectures are inherently unfriendly to user experiences.
Under yesterday’s architectures, user traffic flows through stacks of appliances in the data center—including remote user traffic destined for cloud apps. This traffic backhauling means that users are not able to connect directly to applications, and the additional network hops add significant latency that slows down digital experiences and disrupts productivity. At the same time, the appliances in the data center lack the levels of scalability necessary to handle traffic surges. So, when the load on an appliance increases beyond what it is designed to handle, it can lead to poor performance and outages. As a result, user productivity comes grinding to a halt. Making the situation more difficult is the fact that traditional tools for monitoring user experiences are optimized for data centers. They lack the end-to-end visibility required in our cloud-first, hybrid-work world, and ultimately impede troubleshooting.
Figure 1: Challenges to user experience
Zscaler for superior digital experiences
With its unique zero trust architecture, Zscaler eliminates traffic backhauling. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange acts as an intelligent switchboard that securely connects users, workloads, and devices. Direct-to-app connectivity and cloud security delivered from 150 points of presence mean that traffic no longer needs to be routed to the data center. What’s more, Zscaler automatically optimizes the flow of traffic to apps via the shortest path to ensure the best user experience. And as the world’s largest security cloud, the Zero Trust Exchange boasts the scalability necessary to service customers of all sizes so they can avoid outages and performance issues. This highly differentiated architecture means that employee time (which would have been wasted previously) is freed up for performing work duties and generating value for the organization.
Figure 2: The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange
In addition to the above, Zscaler provides integrated digital experience monitoring (DEM). Unlike traditional tools that lack full context on experience issues created outside their purview in the data center, Zscaler has end-to-end visibility from the device up to the cloud. And with continuous monitoring and real-time alerts, user experience issues can be resolved proactively—before they turn into widespread productivity problems. With streamlined detection and resolution, as well as advanced AI-powered root cause analysis, help desk teams can help users stay working, minimize tickets, and benefit from increased productivity themselves.
Figure 3: User experience monitoring with Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX)
To further illustrate these advantages, the ESG Economic Validation study on the Zero Trust Exchange found that the average organization leveraging Zscaler annually recovers $5.2 million worth of productivity that would otherwise have been lost due to poor user experiences. Overall, the average Zscaler customer experiences an ROI of 139%.
To learn more about the economic value of the Zero Trust Exchange, download our white paper.
Click here to read Part 5 of this blog series, which will discuss how Zscaler can save money for your organization during mergers and acquisitions.
