How customers capture real economic value with zero trust

Hub-and-spoke networks and castle-and-moat security architectures were designed for days gone by when users, apps, and data all resided on premises. But in today’s world, endlessly extending the network to more branch offices, remote users, and cloud apps, and defending network access through ever-growing stacks of point product hardware appliances breeds significant costs.

The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange provides a different kind of architecture (zero trust) that not only enhances security but reduces costs while doing so. With increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and prolonged economic uncertainty, organizations need this zero-trust architecture both now and in the future.

In this blog, you will learn a few of the means by which Zscaler delivers superior economic value than perimeter-based architectures. You will also see examples of the benefits reaped by customers of the One True Zero Trust Platform.

Optimizing technology costs

Perimeter-based architectures entail significant infrastructure costs. Whether it’s for expensive MPLS networks or complex stacks of hardware security appliances for defending network access, massive spend is inevitable. Fortunately, as a comprehensive, cloud-delivered platform, the Zero Trust Exchange decouples security from the network via direct-to-app connectivity, minimizes bandwidth requirements, and eliminates the need for hardware appliances and point products.

As an illustration of these benefits, a Fortune 500 oil and gas company deployed Zscaler and saved tens of millions of dollars in forgone MPLS equipment, branch hardware appliances, and more. Another organization, an independent agency of the U.S. federal government, cut its security costs by 70% by retiring perimeter-based security tools, like VPN, in favor of Zscaler.

Enhancing user productivity

Under yesterday’s architectures, traffic is backhauled to the data center for network access and security. This breeds unnecessary latency that harms user experiences and disrupts productivity. Unfortunately, traditional monitoring tools lack full visibility and impede troubleshooting. But with direct-to-app connectivity optimized by the world’s largest, most high-performance security cloud, user experience is accelerated for enhanced productivity. At the same time, end-to-end digital experience monitoring integrated into the Zero Trust Exchange ensures rapid detection and resolution of any user experience issues, saving time for end users and administrators.

With Zscaler, one state government achieved secure app access that was five times faster than that of VPNs, eliminating hundreds of monthly help desk tickets and contributing to nearly $1 billion in savings. Similarly, a telecommunications company reduced app latency by 20%, cut help desk tickets in half, and quadrupled its ability to quickly resolve user experience issues (from 25% of the time to 95%).

Improving security posture

Castle-and-moat security only serves to increase risk in modern environments. It expands the attack surface, enables lateral threat movement, and fails to stop compromise. This facilitates expensive data breaches that increase costs and decrease revenue through system downtime, customer churn, and more. The good news is that a zero-trust architecture powered by Zscaler minimizes the attack surface, prevents lateral threat movement, and blocks compromise in real-time. This ensures that breaches and their costly consequences are stopped.

One high-tech customer of Zscaler’s reduced the cost of its web security by 40% while enhancing its defenses through full inspection of encrypted traffic, as well as real-time alerting and behavioral analysis. Another organization that deployed Zscaler boosted its protection by 90%, stopping 4 million policy violations and 14,000 threats monthly, blocking ransomware and its impact on productivity.

To learn more on how Zscaler delivers superior economic value than perimeter-based architectures, read our new ebook. It walks through the success stories of several customers, giving concrete examples of how Zscaler helps real organizations overcome their challenges and reduce their costs.