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Zscaler: A Mission to Make the Internet Secure

Jay Chaudhry

Founder, Chairman and CEO


“With a 100% cloud built secure platform, Zscaler can help businesses make the move to the cloud, securely”

Back in the day when organizational network users were all on the network and business applications resided in the physical data center, it made sense to establish a secure perimeter around the business network. But those days are over, the perimeter is gone, and network security is all but irrelevant. Instead, businesses needs to put its defenses and controls where the connections occur— the internet — so that every connection is fast and secure, no matter how or where users connect or where their applications reside.By moving applications and infrastructure to the cloud and untethering employees from their desks, IT managers can realize tremendous advantages in productivity, agility, and cost containment. This is where the role of Zscaler comes into the picture. With a 100% cloud built secure platform, Zscaler can help businesses make the move to the cloud, securely. Zscaler Workload Communications provides zero trust app-to-app and app-to-internet connectivity across hybrid and multi-clouds. The company’s solutions ranges from secure cloud-to-internet connections, cloud-to-cloud connections and secure cloud-to-data center connections.

Zscalar enables businesses to detect sophisticated threats that bypass traditional defenses with the world’s only zero trust platform with integrated deception capabilities. The company’s proactive defense approach Deception detects active threats by populating a client’s environment with decoys: fake endpoints, files, services, databases, users, computers, and other resources that mimic production assets for the sole purpose of alerting the client to adversary presence when they’re touched. Since decoys are hidden from valid users unaware of their existence, any interaction with them is a high-confidence indicator of a breach. Security analysts and SOCs leverage deception-based alerts to generate threat intelligence, stop lateral movement, and orchestrate threat response and containment without human supervision. Zscaler Deception further augments our comprehensive Zero Trust Exchange platform by proactively luring, detecting, and intercepting the most sophisticated active attackers. Zscaler Deception leverages the Zero Trust Exchange to blanket businesses’ environments with decoys and false user paths that lure attackers and detect advanced attacks without operational overhead or false positives. Because its platform is cloud-native, the team can scale a client’s deployment quickly and without disruption. It’s the easiest way to add a powerful layer of high-fidelity threat detection to an entire enterprise.

IT admins can also use the Zscaler Analyzer app to continuously analyze the path between the business location and the ZIA Public Service Edge, or to monitor the time it takes for a browser to load a web page. The company also offers a website portal to verify whether internet access is secured by Zscaler services. This portal also reflects Zscaler’s Data Center to which the user is pointed.

An Advanced Defense

The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange enables fast, secure connections and allows employees to work from anywhere using the internet as the corporate network. Based on the zero trust principle of least-privileged access, it provides comprehensive security using context-based identity and policy enforcement. The Zero Trust Exchange operates across 150 data centers worldwide, ensuring that the service is close to the client’s users, co-located with the cloud providers and applications they are accessing, such as Microsoft 365 and AWS. It guarantees the shortest path between users and their destinations, providing comprehensive security and an amazing user experience. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange significantly reduces risk and stops the most advanced attacks with a proactive, intelligent, and radically simple security architecture.

Delivering Secure Access

With the advent of the pandemic and such situations, users are no longer in the office but are also working from home, on the road, or at a local cafe. They’re connecting from laptops, smartphones, tablets, POS systems and even RF scanners. Even so, this new globally dispersed workforce still requires the same fast, seamless access to business-critical applications that they did in the office while accessing from anywhere on any device. The new modern workplace has created additional complexity for IT teams as they must overcome the need for this flexibility, while improving security and increasing visibility into what users are accessing. For IT to enable users to be productive they must consider a modern approach to fast, secure connectivity. A single app to enforce secure access to enterprise applications from anywhere

Zscaler Client Connector (formerly Zscaler App) is a lightweight application that sits on the endpoint device and enables the modern workforce to securely work from anywhere regardless of device, location, or application being accessed. Whether users leverage a corporate-managed, BYOD, POS system, or RF scanner, traffic is automatically forwarded to the closest Zscaler service edge and determines if a user is looking to access the open internet, a SaaS app, or an internal app running in a public or private cloud or the data center. User traffic is then auto-routed through the correct Zero Trust service, whether it is Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) for secure internet and SaaS access or Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) for secure access to internal applications.  With the highly advanced solution, IT admins can also receive valuable insight into business app, network, and device performance with Zscaler Digital Experience (which integrates with Client Connector).

Cloud-Delivered Security-as-a-Service

Zscaler is responsible for securing more than 400 of the Forbes Global 2000 companies. These organizations and others running some of the world’s most complex networks quickly realize the benefits of Zscaler cloud-delivered security as a service. Zscaler Cloud Protection delivers a new approach that takes the operational complexity and headaches out of cloud workload security. The one-of-a-kind innovative zero trust architecture reduces business risk by automatically remediating security gaps, minimizing the attack surface, and eliminating lateral threat movement. Furthermore, Zscaler Workload Posture quickly identifies, prioritizes, recommends, and remediates misconfigurations and improper permissions within your cloud environments, allowing you to remedy security gaps, restore compliance, and protect data. Siemens, for example, uses Zscaler to secure all the traffic of its 350,000 users in more than 180 countries. In the UK, National Health Services secures more than a million users through the Zscaler cloud. And MCNC, the educational network in North Carolina, runs 53 Gbps of bandwidth through Zscaler in support of its 1.2 million users. Zscaler customers, whether they’re supporting a lot of users, a lot of locations, a lot of bandwidth, or all of the above, rely on Zscaler to secure all their connections and provide the scale they need to operate efficiently and keep users happy and productive.

Ransomware Protection

Zero Trust powers the world’s most effective ransomware protection. Ransomware attacks are increasing 500% year-over-year, with high-impact, headline-making incidents continuously growing in volume and scope. Cybercriminals are getting bolder, their attacks are becoming more sophisticated, and ransom payments keep getting bigger—and no industry is off-limits. The company offers security from such instances with a True Zero Trust Architecture. It enables to protect enterprise with industry’s most comprehensive zero trust platform. It delivers all key security controls as an edge service, close to every end user, branch, or enterprise headquarters. Businesses can also eliminate the risk of lateral movement by directly connecting users and devices to apps, not the network. As a result, the solution enables to stop data loss with the industry’s most holistic data protection solution that spans managed and unmanaged devices, servers, public cloud, and cloud apps.