In light of COVID-19, more employees are working remotely than ever before. While work-from-anywhere is beneficial from a health and safety standpoint, it has required IT departments to adapt their infrastructures to be more resilient to keep business moving forward with minimal disruption while preparing for new, evolving risks and future uncertainties. For instance, as the volume of remote users grows, VPN instability increases, which drives users to shift business off-network, connecting directly to cloud apps, away from security controls.
Additionally, there are now many threats explicitly targeting people working remotely, including quite a few that are leveraging COVID-related lures to deliver malware. For IT leaders, tackling these emerging challenges requires a new, flexible approach to protecting remote employees and their data.
With Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA), including Cloud Firewall, Cloud Sandbox, and Cloud DLP, businesses can completely secure their employees no matter their location or device, enabling fast, direct-to-internet connections while protecting against breaches and data exfiltration—all at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches.
Let’s take a closer look at how these solutions combine to give your users the freedom to work anywhere, securely.
Secure all connections with Zscaler Client Connector
Zscaler Client Connector is the cornerstone of fast, secure connections regardless of user location. Before the user’s device connects to the internet, Zscaler Client Connector establishes a secure connection to the Zscaler cloud. By leveraging Z-tunnel 2.0, all traffic, ports, and protocols are proxied through Zscaler for inspection, which results in fast, secure direct-to-application experiences for users without the need for a performance-hindering VPN.
Identical protection on- and off-network with Advanced Cloud Firewall
When people work remotely, they use different applications and exhibit different browsing behavior and internet activity than they would on-network. Because traditional firewalls do not protect off-network users, the chance of getting infected with malware increases significantly. In today’s work-from-anywhere environment, it’s critical for organizations to address these differences in user behavior and have the ability to easily scale their corporate policies to off-network connections, like blocking BitTorrent and remote desktop protocol (RDP)-based apps, like Teamviewer, regardless of port or protocol, user device or location, evasion tactics, or SSL encryption. With Zscaler Advanced Cloud Firewall and Z-tunnel 2.0, you can apply identical protection with a single, consistent policy, wherever your users connect.
Always-on advanced threat protection with Cloud Sandbox
Users are most vulnerable to ransomware and other attacks when off-network and away from a secure gateway. To protect these off-network users, Zscaler Cloud Sandbox is a must for uncovering and preventing the delivery of advanced targeted attacks. With Zscaler's Advanced Cloud Sandbox, the delivery of unknown files can be halted until confirmed clean, reducing the likelihood of patient-zero attacks, which are becoming more popular with attackers looking for backdoors into a corporate network. Additionally, complete SSL inspection enables you to inspect every byte of traffic—allowing you to uncover hidden threats before they can reach your users.
Cloud DLP prevents data exfiltration—everywhere
Data loss, intentional or unintentional, can create a nightmare for security and compliance teams—especially if the data exfiltrated is confidential or sensitive. Zscaler Cloud DLP prevents this from happening while eliminating blind spots by leveraging native SSL inspection capabilities. Also, Zscaler Exact Data Match technology aids compliance by automatically identifying personal information to keep it airtight from exposure and exfiltration. All of this combines to not only strengthen your security posture but also to meet today's stringent compliance standards.
With Zscaler Internet Access, Cloud Firewall, Cloud Sandbox, and Cloud DLP, not only will your business be well-equipped to secure employees, wherever they’re connecting, but you will also have the infrastructure in place to scale work-from-anywhere. Furthermore, this improvement in security posture can be achieved without negatively affecting user experiences, and without the cost of adding and managing more hardware as capacity needs grow.
Zscaler has already helped thousands of customers embrace the new work-from-anywhere reality by enabling them to stay resilient while keeping their employees productive and, more importantly, safe.
Learn more about how Zscaler Internet Access supports your work-from-anywhere efforts.
Jen Toscano is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Zscaler
